I've been playing around with AMD64/x86-64 emulation using QEmu via the UTM app. My initial use was Ubuntu 20.04 to assess the performance potential for someone who wants to emulate either Linux or Windows on Apple Silicon and specifically the M1. I'm testing on my M1 16GB/1TB MacBook Air.
I've been posting that the performance is not usable but now I have to revise that estimation. Playing around with the various controls for customizing the emulator I think I may have underestimated its performance. The current settings for the System tab and check the Show Advanced Settings box, I changed the CPU to "Enables all features supported by the accelerator in the current host (max)", 4 cores, and check the "Force Multicore" to enabled. There is a scary notice below the Force Multicore checkbox that says, "Set to 0 to use maximum supported CPUs. Force multicore might result in incorrect emulation." Because of this, I originally didn't check the "Force Multicore" box but I had terrible multicore performance on the M1. Checking the box seems to bring back real multicore performance and speeds up the emulator by an immense amount.
I have no idea under what circumstances incorrect emulation "might" occur from the "Force Multicore" box but I didn't seem to encounter anything in my somewhat brief testing of Ubuntu 20.04. If you want to experiment with AMD64 emulation on the M1 try these settings.
My conclusion is that my pessimism for usable x86/x64/AMD64 emulation for things like Windows was wrong. Someone who is more invested in Windows and has an M1 Mac should pursue this and follow up this thread. At this point, I think that emulating Intel/AMD processors isn't going to be as bad as I thought and keep in mind the M1 is the lowest performance Apple Silicon Mac SoC that Apple will ever produce.
I've been posting that the performance is not usable but now I have to revise that estimation. Playing around with the various controls for customizing the emulator I think I may have underestimated its performance. The current settings for the System tab and check the Show Advanced Settings box, I changed the CPU to "Enables all features supported by the accelerator in the current host (max)", 4 cores, and check the "Force Multicore" to enabled. There is a scary notice below the Force Multicore checkbox that says, "Set to 0 to use maximum supported CPUs. Force multicore might result in incorrect emulation." Because of this, I originally didn't check the "Force Multicore" box but I had terrible multicore performance on the M1. Checking the box seems to bring back real multicore performance and speeds up the emulator by an immense amount.
I have no idea under what circumstances incorrect emulation "might" occur from the "Force Multicore" box but I didn't seem to encounter anything in my somewhat brief testing of Ubuntu 20.04. If you want to experiment with AMD64 emulation on the M1 try these settings.
My conclusion is that my pessimism for usable x86/x64/AMD64 emulation for things like Windows was wrong. Someone who is more invested in Windows and has an M1 Mac should pursue this and follow up this thread. At this point, I think that emulating Intel/AMD processors isn't going to be as bad as I thought and keep in mind the M1 is the lowest performance Apple Silicon Mac SoC that Apple will ever produce.
