There could be a sea change in the upcoming Copilot couticon-based snapdragon-based Copilot + Microsoft helped launch last year. They took long enough. Many of the first Copilot+ devices sport a Chip that leaves most of the rest of your apps – and in fact your entire PC game library – up in the air. Microsoft is finally pushing an emulator update to get all those apps up. I hate to be that person, but Microsoft should have been looking at Apple’s early changes to its M-Series chips if they wanted a fire switch in the promised land of Arm.
Last year, Microsoft and Qualcomm entered their big hardware rup on the horse made with Copilot based on COPILOT + PC. The first of these devices uses the Snapdragon X Series Chip, which promises better battery life and AI performance compared to CPUs then found in both Intel and AMD. The end of the story was, these were chips based on Lightning, with a completely different chip microarchitecture compared to what Intel and AMD use. Microsoft promised that it had worked with a number of large software companies such as Adobe to force the inappropriateness going forward.
Yes, it may have been as good as that initial announcement more than a year later. This month, Microsoft Stealth dropped a new update that could finally provide relief to the legion of gamers and legacy App users of Windows on the Snapdragon island. As explained in a report on Windows Latest, the update could eventually allow users to emulate capabilities that are only available on non-hardware chips. Specifically, they are AVX and AVX2 extensions to the X86 instruction set. What the hell is that? It represents advanced vector extensions, which X86 chips do multiple processes at the same time. This is how video encodes and physics engines in games work on today’s chipsets. Enabling AVx and AVX2 can involve digging through the properties of each application to open them. In fact, it is possible that we have to wait until the information of Microsoft Details that the character, called Prism, will work seamlessly with games, possibly with a new launch of the laptop next year.
Why did it take you so long, Microsoft?
I haven’t had a chance to test the new update of Windows 25h2 by hand (specifically KB5066835). The latest Windows wanted a patch that allowed them to get more games to launch and run, no matter how well they worked to rely on the title. Microsoft may not be big bink about this patch, as it is waiting for the big launch of the next slide of Snapdragon X2 laptops to arrive early next year. QUALCOMM told Gizmodo last month that its push for compatibility with games was “slower than we wanted.” However, the company’s head of mobile and computing, Alex Katouzian, repeated QuiteryComm was sticking with Microsoft’s Prism for its compatibility or simulation technology.
Snapdragon devices can still run a bunch of the most frequently used apps for 365 of your 365 of your own. That includes most of Adobe Creative Cloud. However, many consumers who bought these PCs had little idea what they were getting into. Some consumers were at a loss when legacy applications or drivers were not compatible with their new Windows PC. The most obvious suspect was the games. This situation became more and more difficult when devices like Microsoft’s Snapdragon-based Laptop-based Laptop-based Laptop 7
Apple had an arm shift
Compare all this hubbub to Apple’s efforts in the last five years. In 2020, the company announced that it will embark on a two-year transition from copper-based chips to silicon-based M-Series. Apple introduced the rosetta 2 compatibility layer as part of the major macos sur. This allowed most of the Intel-Centric applications to run on the M1 Chip. Users didn’t have to do anything special. In typical Apple fashion, most things “just work,” despite how they just appeared in the programs and whether they were running then. If Microsoft had taken the same tack and offered a refined compatibility layer from the start, they might have had an ARM-on-PC Renaissance. Instead, Intel is preparing its next X86 DEBOT, Panther Lake, and it’s already showing a lot of gaming promise.
This year, at WWDC 2025, Apple announced that it will finally take Rosetta 2 to the grave with macOS 28 in 2027. Meanwhile, there may be some legacy apps that will simply break Apple’s latest devices. That’s the price of progress, I guess.
