Has anyone read or heard anything about what's in the future for Parallels, regarding new Apple-CPU'd Mac hardware? Will there be a Parallels versions released for this new hardware? If so, will it only be for ARM-based Linux and macOS, or will it emulate Intel-based hardware to allow hosting of Windows/DOS VMs? Anyone know if there's a FAQ or press release about Parallels on ARM somewhere? Thanks.
I'm really interested in this too. It seems to me native virtualisation means ARM hardware must run ARM Windows but that's pretty limiting - for one thing I'm told you cannot actually buy a Windows ARM license.
Right now it's relatively straight forwards to run say, Windows or Linux under virtualisation. The reason this runs so well is because the actual instruction set which in this case is x64_86 (i.e. Intel or AMD) remains the same, you are just using a hypervisor to manage and segregate the different virtual machines. The key difference once you switch to Apple Silicone is this is no longer using the same instruction set, and instead uses Arm as opposed to x86_64. Its not all bad news as you can already emulate x86 code in the Arm version of Windows, and Microsoft have recently announced you will soon be able to do the same with 64bit applications as well. I think with a company as large as Apple opting to move over to Arm architecture, its really only a matter of time before the likes of Dell, HP and Lenovo start to do the same and the more people adopt the platform the faster it will be for applications to be compiled natively for other architectures besides Intel/AMD, and over time the requirement to run 64bit Windows installations will simply become less important to people. But for now, I really wouldn't expect the full emulation of 64bit Windows 10 on Apple Silicone to be an overnight thing.
This may be true BUT there are untold commercial applications out there where the customer has no interest in paying for you to update everything to compile and deploy on ARM.
Absolutely, this isn't going to be an overnight thing like Apple might want people to think. Its not going to be until a majority of computers are sold with Arm chips, everything from £199.99 budget machines all the way to huge enterprises rolling Arm based Windows/macOS machines out across entire departments before a lot of commercial app developers will even bat an eye lid of the prospect of rewriting their business and commercial applications. Arm is cheap, power efficient (so again... cheap), and actually makes it super easy for others to do what Apple is currently doing, especially if people really will continue to pay $1200 for an Apple laptop despite the fact its costing them significantly less in supply chain and licensing costs. Thanks to the way the licensing works with these chips, I'll be surprised if within the next 5 years the majority of low - mid range computers aren't Arm by default in both Windows and Apple land.
