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M1 Virtualization: UTM vs Parallels?
- Thread starter sulliops
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I remember all the fuss when the Apple Silicon Macs were introduced, and then all of the worry on whether Microsoft would legit offer Windows on ARM... People worrying about running older versions of Windows, etc...
I'd say we're in a good place right now with virtualization.
![Screenshot 2023-07-26 at 12.31.52 PM.jpeg]( "Screenshot 2023-07-26 at 12.31.52 PM.jpeg")
![Screenshot 2023-07-26 at 12.32.17 PM.jpeg]( "Screenshot 2023-07-26 at 12.32.17 PM.jpeg")
I'd say we're in a good place right now with virtualization.
Microsoft was already offering WoA when the M1 was released - the Surface Pro X was their first ARM-based machine since the ill-fated Surface RT in the Windows 8 era (sidenote: I had a Surface RT, and it was straight trash). The issue was that the licensing at the time only allowed for direct installation on compatible hardware (meaning Microsoft's HW or a select handful of models from Samsung, Dell, and Lenovo). In fact, Apple said in the State of the Union address when M1 was announced that Microsoft was the holdup on bringing WoA to Apple Silicon.
The biggest difference across the board is honestly how many Linux distros have embraced ARM-based versions of their OS. Since Microsoft is trying to compete with those OSes in the server/enterprise space, they were basically forced to expand the WoA licensing terms.
My question has never been if Apple Silicon can do virtualization, Apple indicated that it supported this from the beginning. My question has to do with emulation, running non-ARM based operating systems, which (of course) where UTM comes into play. Traditionally emulation is much slower, and the question I have is how performant Apple Silicon is when emulating an x86 OS running x86 programs. Rosetta 2 does really well on the Mac app side, but I do not know if UTM or other emulation software can leverage it? Thanks for the info!
Rosetta 2 is for translating x86 into ARM64 code. It does not work in the other direction (translating ARM64 to x86). Emulators (such as MAME, Dolphin, BSNES, etc.) have to emulate the HW of the native system in code, so any emulator updated for Apple Silicon would emulate the original system using ARM64 compatible code. One trick is that as you get into newer systems such as the Xbox and Playstation 4/5, the complexities of emulation grow exponentially.