I don't get it. does the Snapdragon X Elite have some sort of hardware emulation built in then?

I’m pretty sure Microsoft will be developing software emulation layer for Windows ARM, so it can support backwards compatibility on as many kinds of ARM processors as possible. But since Snapdragon is only claiming that this works on the X Elite, it’s either a matter of performance, or hardware restrictions?

I dont' see how it can run at all without some sort of emulation. the architecture is completely different.

The mac chips do this with rosetta

yeah I get that. im curious why this chip says its runs windows x86 right off the bat. at least that is what it sounds like to me from the article but maybe im misunderstanding. so it sounds to me like it has some sort of hardware emulation to x86.

It does. Apple has Rosetta and Microsoft has Prism. They are effectively the same thing, being a translation layer for x86 to ARM.

yeah but its in the os not the hardware, no?

I think you are misunderstanding the article.

Windows for ARM is designed specifically for ARM, and it has the translation layer. The translation layer effectively allows it to function as if it’s running an x86 Windows install off the bat by offering the ability to run x86 applications on the ARM hardware. It’s not actually running an x86 OS.

The chipset is very powerful but it doesn’t require additional hardware to achieve this translation. The additional processing power built into these chips are NPUs (Neural Processing Units) which are designed to more effectively run ML/AI/LLM workloads. The translation system just works on the normal raw processing power of the machine.