Microsoft's new Prism emulator to run apps 2x faster on Windows Arm PCs

Amongst the host of changes made at Microsoft in the last few months, the increased focus on Arm-based devices has caught my attention. Windows-on-Arm was never really a huge success, but with the latest push, things are about to change!

Microsoft’s latest releases, Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, are powered by Snapdragon X Elite, an Arm processor.

Talking about Windows-on-Arm during the recent Surface Event, Microsoft highlighted the enhanced capabilities and the efforts it made for app compatibility on Arm PCs.

For apps that are not yet compatible, Microsoft has a new emulator, Prism. According to the Redmond-based tech giant, the Prism translation layer will do for Windows what Rosetta did for Macs. And the success story of Rosetta is well known to all!

Discussing the benefits of the new Prism emulator, the Head of the Windows and Surface team, Pavan Davuluri, said,

We spent a ton of energy here. For apps that are not yet native, we’re now able to take advantage of Prism’s capabilities and solve this with the better energy, platform, and performance efficiency of the emulator.

According to Microsoft’s official blog, the Prism emulator helps apps deliver 2x performance with Snapdragon X Elite compared to the previous generation.

And if they (users) need to run apps in emulation, they’ll experience a significant performance boost with the new Prism emulator for app compatibility and performance. Emulated apps on PCs running the Snapdragon X Elite are more than 2x faster than previous generation Windows Arm devices running Windows 11 22H2.

Third-party app developers have been more than enthusiastic about the idea of Windows-on-Arm, with many already releasing supported app versions. This includes Google Chrome, Brave, Opera, Adobe Photoshop, and Spotify, amongst others.

On its part, Microsoft has released Arm-compatible versions of several native apps, including Teams, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive.

For the apps that don’t yet support the Arm architecture, you can rely on the new Prism emulator and eliminate performance throttling. On the contrary, it will be a significantly improved experience over the previous generation!

What do you think about Microsoft’s new Prism emulator? Share with our readers in the comments section.