Microsoft decided that this is only available for sale for system builders. The downside for this approach is that there is no official way, currently, to get a license for an ARM-based version of Windows. Leaving only virtualization as a real option. As it’s using QEMU under the hood, it is capable of emulating different processor architectures (like x86-64) but it can do virtualization for the same as the host’s architecture as well.Īfter a quick test, on which I plan to create a more detailed article in the future, using emulation seems to cause a lot of overhead and turns out to be too slow to be usable currently. UTM offers QEMU-based virtaluzation and emulation with a handy GUI for both IOS and macOS.

Virtualization is fast(er) but requires software written for the hardware platform it is running on.īoth of these methods can be accomplished with UTM ( ). Emulation offers maximum compatibility as it doesn’t require software written for ARM specifically but it’s pretty slow. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. The second involves emulation, where we will translate instructions between the running operating system (Windows in this case) and the hardware. The first involves virtualization, as we can’t (yet) run Windows natively on an M1-based machine. As mentioned above, there are two options to get Windows running on an Apple M1-based device.

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