What do you think about 'Intel Bridge Technology'?

[SamCool939]

So, when Microsoft was announced that they will bring the support of Android apps, they said that they will using the 'Intel Bridge Technology', that many sources said 'it will looks like Rossetta/Rossetta 2 but it translates ARM apps to x86-64 architecture', and I was once hyped on that. I will not talk about the cancelling of WSA on the General Availibity, but I think Microsoft is giving us too much expectation. I first was dissapointed when I'm looking through internal WSA app that requires 8GB RAM, why it need so much RAM if it just a 'architecture translator' program? And the peak of my dissapointment is when WSA released, it said if I'm need to enable Hyper-V so it could be run. And it's very lag in my 4GB RAM laptop because that crap Hyper-V.

The point is: Why Intel and Microsoft doesn't learning what Apple do in its Rossetta?

What do you think?

[d3vi1]

The point is: Why Intel and Microsoft doesn't learning what Apple do in its Rossetta?

Because in Windows, by design, you do parameter passing, which requires that all the libraries are the same architecture as the binaries that you're running, since you can't thunk when you do function calling. While on MacOS, being a microkernel based design you have message passing, so effectively you can talk with binaries running on a different architecture (such as the Window Server or the Kernel). That translates into: Windows needs to run a specially emulated ARM kernel with ARM userland on x86 (so virtualization with CPU emulation QEMU-Style), while on macOS, you just need the binaries to be emulated or translated, but not the OS and libraries.

[TechyTommy]

Well, could you make your own emulators for this? And is Windows 11 the only thing to use Intel Bridge Technology? This sounds like emulation to me.

[zamadatix]

Microsoft did the same thing Rosetta 2 does (x86 translated to run on arm) before Rosetta 2 was a thing. Android arm apps running on x86 windows however requires more than just one thing be solved, yes something needs to translate arm apps to run on x86 (Intel bridge) but something else needs to handle running Android apps on windows (in this case an Android VM). Both work in conjunction to do more than simply translate the architecture for the same OS like Rosetta 2.