Arm Desktop: x86 Emulation
7 comments
·August 7, 2025CoastalCoder
testing22321
I have an M1 MacBook Air I bought used a year ago for $800.
I edit a ton of 4K video, photos off my Sony Mirrorless, write articles, web, etc.
It is by far the fastest computer I’ve ever used. I have never once known or cared if anything is running x86.
saghm
The first time I got one of the ARM MacBooks from a job after years of being given the x86 ones, even my cats could immediately tell the difference. The x86 ones were basically constantly operating at a warm temperature that caused them to both want to nap on it, so they'd scuffle a few times a week when inevitably one of them tried to get on my desk only to find the other already napping there. In around 20 months of using M1 and newer laptops from employers, I've had a cat nap on them maybe three times total, because it pretty rarely is noticeably warmer than anything else in the room, so they have no special interest in it compared to much more enticing furniture like my keyboard.
varispeed
Sadly some companies are stubborn and just won't support ARM. For instance if you need to use Autodesk Revit for work, you are sentenced to Windows x86 hell.
ezcrypt
Tried box64 on a Raspberry Pi 5 the other day and it worked above expectations. Except for a minor glitch with OGG audio, I got about 60 FPS in Xonotic (x86_64 emulated on AArch64).
geerlingguy
For games in particular, the best performance comes if you use a dedicated GPU [1]. Though the CPU emulation can still be a limiting factor.
I'm able to play most 5-10 year old games that aren't tied to DRMs at 30-60 fps on a Pi [2] (and certainly on Ampere) using box64 and an AMD GPU (or Nvidia on an Ampere system), haven't spent much time with FEX-emu though.
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/system76-built-fastes...
[2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-r...
ignoramous
Tangential: Google engs recently presented RISC-V -> x64 binary translation in Android viz. Berberis: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HjhzXZqjFrU
Also: https://github.com/MattPD/cpplinks/blob/master/assembly.risc...
I'm curious how long until most users just don't care about whether or not their CPU has native x86 support.
As someone developing HPC applications, I generally don't care either, as long as the hardware has good fundamentals, and is well supported by the available compilers and profiling tools.
Honestly at this point the only reason that I'm aware of to prefer Intel for my workloads is the awesomeness of VTune.
How's the quality of the equivalent AMD or Arm tooling these days?