Update for Windows PCs with ARM chips could improve compatibility with x86 games and applications

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processors are the fastest ARM-based chips available for Windows laptops to date, making PCs with ARM chips competitive with their Intel and AMD-powered counterparts for the first time.

But hardware is only part of the puzzle. Most PC applications are designed for systems with x86 processors. So Microsoft developed an emulator called Prism that allows you to run x86 applications on Windows PCs. Reviewers say that results can vary, but overall the experience is much better than it was on older PCs with Qualcomm processors. And now Microsoft has rolled out a preview of an update to Prism that should improve performance in some situations “by adding support for more CPU features under emulation.”

Prism basically gives the computer a virtual x86 CPU that can be leveraged by software that doesn’t run natively on ARM, and the new version of Prism adds support for more extensions to the x86 instruction set including AVX, AVX2, BMI, FMA, and F16C.

Since a growing number of PC games rely on AVX2, this update could substantially improve game compatibility for PCs with Snapdragon X chips.

Microsoft says the new version of Prism is already available in Windows 11 24H2, allowing users run Adobe Premiere Pro 25 on PCs with ARM processors.

But starting with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27744 on the Canary Channel, the new version of Prism works with any 64-bit x86 application, allowing “some games or creative apps that were blocked due to CPU requirements before” to work on PCs with ARM processors running the latest preview.

There’s no word on when the new version of Prism will be available for users that aren’t members of the Windows Insider program testing pre-release builds of Windows.

via The Verge and xda-developers