Since Apple released MacBooks with its own ARM-based Apple M1 chips, users have been trying to run Windows on these machines. Now, as Microsoft does not license its operating system to run on devices other than its own Surface line and other manufacturers using ARM-based systems, it is pretty much impossible to run Windows using Apple’s Bootcamp. However, many engineers have been trying out other ways to run Windows on Apple’s M1 devices, and recently an AWS engineer achieved success as he successfully ran Microsoft’s OS on his M1-powered device.
The engineer, Alexander Graf (@_AlexGraf) recently shared a tweet (attached below) showcasing the feat. And according to his statement, Graf used the QEMU virtualization tool for Windows on ARM. This open-source software emulates access to hardware components like the CPU and the GPU.
Who said Windows wouldn't run well on #AppleSilicon? It's pretty snappy here 😁. #QEMU patches for reference: https://t.co/qLQpZgBIqI pic.twitter.com/G1Usx4TcvL
— Alexander Graf (@_AlexGraf) November 26, 2020
Now, running Windows on the latest M1-based Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, and the Mac Mini is not impossible. As pointed out by Apple’s SVP, Craig Federighi, it really depends on Microsoft whether they would allow their OS to run on the latest Apple computers. Moreover, Federighi also mentioned that the latest Apple M1 devices are quite capable of running Microsoft’s software.
So, following Graf’s tweet, another Twitter user, Sunshine Biscuit at scale (@imbushuo), shared the Geekbench scores of an Apple M1 device and Microsoft’s Surface Pro X running Windows 10.
Some GeekBench* scores, not yet tuned (like topology and whatever) about Windows on M1:
GB5 https://t.co/ifUGPnpTDI
GB4 aa64 https://t.co/jpCfcNlRRc
GB4 XtaJIT (x86) https://t.co/nfUImwJmz8*: I don’t like GB for technical reasons, but the score is provided for curiosity
— Sunshine Biscuit at scale 🍪 (@imbushuo) November 28, 2020
The Apple device running Windows 10 got a single-core score of 1288 and a multi-core score of 5685. On the other hand, Microsoft’s own Surface device running the latest Windows version got mere scores of 800 and 3000 for single-core and multi-core respectively.
Hence, these scores suggest that Microsoft’s operating system runs better on Apple’s new M1 devices than on its own Surface devices.
