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Windows Central
Windows Central
Technology
Ben Wilson

What is Microsoft's Prism? Explaining the emulation engine for Windows on Arm and why it's compared to Apple's Rosetta 2

Pavan Davuluri speaking on stage about Prism emulation for Windows.

There has been a lot of buzz around laptops and other portable Windows devices this week. Microsoft's Surface and Windows 11 AI stage show kicked off a gigantic list of exciting announcements before its Build event began, including a brand-new range of Copilot+ AI PCs powered by Qualcomm's revolutionary Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus ARM processors.

While the experiences of running traditional x86-64 apps on ARM-powered Windows devices range from acceptable to exceptional, the appeal of Windows on Arm is about to become even stronger. Until now, Microsoft offered developers its ARM64EC application binary interface (ABI), allowing them to gradually replace sections of x64 (64-bit) binaries in their apps with ARM-native code to improve performance.

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