Microsoft brings x64 emulation on Arm to Windows 11 only

Microsoft has made x64 app emulation on Arm64 widely available but only for PCs with Arm chips running Windows 11. The preview of x64 emulation ran on Windows 10 on ARM from December.

Microsoft has announced the wide availability of x64 emulation for Windows 11 and the company emphasizes that it requires a PC running Windows 11 on ARM. That announcement came with a blog post from December last year announcing the preview of x64 emulation for Windows 10 on ARM.

Those who want to run x64 apps on Windows PCs with Arm will have to upgrade to Windows 11. The company will continue to support Windows 10 on ARM until October 2025. Windows 10 on ARM appeared at the end of 2017, but since then the OS has only been able to run 32-bit x86 apps via WOW64 emulation, with which a lot of software did not work on the operating system.

Windows on ARM could already run 64-bit software, but only if it was developed for ARM hardware. Microsoft hopes that Windows will also become popular on laptops and tablets with, for example, Snapdragon processors based on Arm. The company itself is releasing a Surface Pro X device with Arm soc.

In June, Microsoft announced ARM64EC for Windows 11 on ARM. This application binary interface is interoperable with x64 and ARM64EC code from developers in apps running natively on Windows 11 on ARM while x64 code then runs via emulation.

Surface Pro X with Windows 11