MP 7,1 What does Apple's switch to ARM based processors mean for the future of the Mac Pro

[Korican100]

I would imagine apple's new processor would eventually apply to their whole mac lineup. Wondering if that means Mac Pro 7,1 will be phased out sooner or later? Perhaps my concerns don't make sense, but I wanted to ask the board their thoughts around the future of the Mac Pro with apple's own ARM processor.
[automerge]1591753616[/automerge]

 

[dspdoc]

I would imagine apple's new processor would eventually apply to their whole mac lineup. Wondering if that means Mac Pro 7,1 will be phased out sooner or later? Perhaps my concerns don't make sense, but I wanted to ask the board their thoughts around the future of the Mac Pro with apple's own ARM processor.
[automerge]1591753616[/automerge]

Wondering the same thing myself.

I am within the return window for my 7,1 MP, but I am not sure if it is worth returning.

The ARM thread is causing a lot of hype and panic that Apple is going to suddenly obsolete machines they just released within a year or two. Would they really do that with this all new 2019 MP design? It seems to me that they put a whole lot of effort into developing it. It is quite a polished machine and built phenomenally.

I would think that Apple has had a roadmap laid out long before they released it. So if ARM was right around the corner why wouldn't they just save it for that?

The 7,1 sure does feel like the modular design all us MP users were begging for. It seems like a machine that should still be current 10 years from now...?

 

[Slash-2CPU]

I just can’t imagine an ARM CPU replacing a Xeon with any adequacy.

I’d bet Mini, MacBook(maybe a new MacBook Air), and the lowest-end iMac get Apple CPU’s while higher end iMacs, maybe a Mini-Pro, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro keep Intel.

 

[OkiRun]

Roadmap meet reality ^
There's no way we could know the short-term and long-term effects of COVID-19 and the trade disputes on Apple's product development. There were indications they might pull out production of some products from China and I'm sure there are ongoing issues with supply chains.

 

[CreatorCode]

To give some historical context, the Mac Pro's predecessor was the Power Mac G5.

Apple first announced the Intel processor architecture transition on June 6, 2005.
The last Power Mac G5 A1117, PowerMac11,2, was released October 19, 2005.
It was discontinued after the release of the first Mac Pro in August 2006.
The last full OS release, 10.5 Leopard, to support the G5 was was released on October 26, 2007
The first full OS that did not support the G5, 10.6 Snow Leopard, was released June 8, 2009
The final security update for Leopard on PowerPC was Security Update 2011-004 released June 23, 2011.
The Power Mac G5 became "vintage" per Apple's rules five years after final sale -- August 2011

I would say that five years after last sale is about as long as you can expect any sort of support to persist. If you figure that Apple will take about a year or so to replace the Macintel Pro with an ARMed Mac Pro -- say, mid 2021 -- then you can expect Macintel products to be supported until about mid 2026.

 

[dspdoc]

To give some historical context, the Mac Pro's predecessor was the Power Mac G5.

Apple first announced the Intel processor architecture transition on June 6, 2005.
The last Power Mac G5 A1117, PowerMac11,2, was released October 19, 2005.
It was discontinued after the release of the first Mac Pro in August 2006.
The last full OS release, 10.5 Leopard, to support the G5 was was released on October 26, 2007
The first full OS that did not support the G5, 10.6 Snow Leopard, was released June 8, 2009
The final security update for Leopard on PowerPC was Security Update 2011-004 released June 23, 2011.
The Power Mac G5 became "vintage" per Apple's rules five years after final sale -- August 2011

I would say that five years after last sale is about as long as you can expect any sort of support to persist. If you figure that Apple will take about a year or so to replace the Macintel Pro with an ARMed Mac Pro -- say, mid 2021 -- then you can expect Macintel products to be supported until about mid 2026.

That's still an EXTREMELY short lifespan for those that dropped north of $40k! I have $8k into mine, which IMHO is still a boatload for a computer. I guess it's all relative and depends on perspective. For the stupidly wealthy, that is nothing. For the everyday working man, that's quite an investment!

 

[goMac]

That's still an EXTREMELY short lifespan for those that dropped north of $40k! I have $8k into mine, which IMHO is still a boatload for a computer. I guess it's all relative and depends on perspective. For the stupidly wealthy, that is nothing. For the everyday working man, that's quite an investment!

Paying more for a computer doesn't mean it will last longer. I mean, unless you buy $100 laptop at Walmart or something.

Generally any computer at any price stays current for about 4-5 years. Someone who dropped $40k on a computer is probably spending $40k every 5 years anyway. Why pay top dollar if you're going to be ok with 5 year old performance? Doesn't make sense.

 

[Bakafish]

It is very unlikely that the Mac Pro was developed in complete disregard of the upcoming architecture changes. I have said in other threads that the T2 chip having such low level control, and the needs of GPU's and co-processors like the Afterburner card having direct memory, storage and PCI access, it is likely there will be an MPX card that adds the AXX chip, and that it should work pretty seamlessly. There is no technical reason that the OS can't support both architectures simultaneously, even if it is in a primitive form with the Intel CPU basically put to sleep by the T2 as it boots to the AXX.

As far as Intel vs AXX performance, I think anyone betting against the custom ARM chips is ignoring the performance of the existing chips. A CPU designed without mobile constraints being at the forefront is likely to be a monster.

 

[codehead1]

Why saddle a new ARM-based design with Mac OS? I think it's more likely to start a new branch of the Apple tree, if anything more in the laptop/tablet+ direction that sells bigger numbers. There is not huge emerging market awaiting a replacement for desktop/workstation Mac OS—this should be evident in how long it took to replace the last Mac Pro with this one. The Mac Pro may die a natural death, but I doubt it'll be because it was replaced with an ARM-based design in the manner the Mac Pro G5 was replaced by a Xeon design.

 

[goMac]

It is very unlikely that the Mac Pro was developed in complete disregard of the upcoming architecture changes. I have said in other threads that the T2 chip having such low level control, and the needs of GPU's and co-processors like the Afterburner card having direct memory, storage and PCI access, it is likely there will be an MPX card that adds the AXX chip, and that it should work pretty seamlessly. There is no technical reason that the OS can't support both architectures simultaneously, even if it is in a primitive form with the Intel CPU basically put to sleep by the T2 as it boots to the AXX.

I don't think T2 can redirect boot to a PCIe card slot, and a PCIe v3 slot is way too slow for this sort of setup anyway.

 

[Quu]

I'm a big enthusiast, build my own water cooled computers and servers which I have done so for over 15 years. I know a great deal about computer hardware right down to manufacturing including chip fabrication and design.

I'm also a software engineer and I write server based software that runs on x86 and ARM based architectures, in the past I worked on FPGA hardware where we prototyped chip functions before committing to designing and fabricating ASIC's. I say all this to provide some context to what I'm about to say next.

Based on all the relevant data we have about Apples ARM chips they are core-for-core already better than Intel on generalised computing tasks. And that in itself is absoloutely insane because the chips Apple is producing are in phones with extremely small power and thermal budgets.

We're talking execution parity with processors that consume 30 to 50x more watts and release 100x more heat. This is literally unheard of in the industry and to put this in perspective for Intel to even get close (and still be 10x worse) they would have to bin their processors to within an inch of their life.

If you're not familiar with that term it's where they test the chips they produce and put them in different categories based on their performance such as how high they clock, if any parts of the chip are defective, how much power the chip consumes at the clock speeds it's capable of, how much heat it produces while under load etc

Apple has managed to reach parity not with their top 0.01% of produced chips like Intel does with some of their super high-end XEON's and ultra low-power U skus. They've been able to do it with from what we can decipher 86-92% of their entire chip yields.

They sell 100 Million iPhones with their latest SoC every year and they all perform the same which is to say absoloutely steller, top of the line performance, two years ahead of their closest mobile counterpart (Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos etc).

So with all that out of the way what does all this mean for the Mac Pro? - When you're wanting to build a large chip one with a wide memory bus, lots of cores, lots of on-board cache you need to start with a strong foundation and in todays chip fabrication that means more than anything performance-per-watt.

If you have a die that consumes 2.5 Watts per core and you scale that to 64 Cores which is the kind of chip appropriate for a next generation Mac Pro suddenly you have 160 Watts for raw core compute. And that's before you factor in the power consumption for core-to-core communication (uncore) which with that many cores could be 20-30 watts then the I/O such as memory and PCIe and any other "uncore" usage.

Things can quickly spiral into the 250-350 Watt range. But here is Apple with an architecture that is already sub 1 Watt for the cores. Suddenly they can produce a 64 Core chip where all the cores can be 60 Watts leaving ample room for uncore power.

This is what's exciting. Instead of coming at the processor design challange from the top (performance) they've come at it from the bottom (low power). This lends itself perfectly to making a large chip with lots of cores a chip that is appropriate for a Mac Pro class computer.

Now on top of this as I mentioned Apple has put these high performance chips in phones that have very small thermal envelopes and yet we've seen Apple able to reach very high clock speeds on these processors even when under sustained loads. This is noteworthy because this is without proper heatsinks. Apple at most has an IHS on their chips now (Integrated Heat Spreader) which is thinner than the thickness of a coin.

When they design a chip using the principle architecture of their mobile SoC's into laptops and desktops where they can attach heatsinks that have 45 Watts (MacBook Pro) to 300 Watts (Mac Pro) of heat dissipation they can run them a lot faster.

Based on AMD's usage of TSMC's 7nm process node we know that the high performance node offered by TSMC (which does differ slightly from the low-power 7nm node utilised by Apple) that the sweet spot for the transistor switching speed is around 4GHz.

This is the point where heat output, power consumption and clock speed come together for the best trade offs on each to deliver a high performance chip which doesn't guzzle energy essentially. So right now in a phone Apple is pushing 2.3GHz and already streamrolling Intels 3.6GHz-4.2GHz mobile chips core-for-core. Now imagine what Apple can do delivering their own archicture at these same clock speeds.

I need to remind you, we can only do projections because we can't overclock an iPhone SoC to see what might be.

Now I do want to temper expectations a little. There are things Apple has to overcome to deliver for a Mac Pro type computer.

Firstly I cannot overstate how difficult it is to keep so many cores fed. The interconnects between CPU cores in a single die can really hamper performance especially in the kinds of high end workflows professionals will be performing where core-to-core communication is highly utilised due to multithreading.

Secondly if Apple decides to make chips that are one huge die (like Intel) that will decrease yield rates due to increases in defects. It will also increase costs as more of the wafers produced for them will go to waste. So this is a two-fold problem, clock speeds and core counts may become restricted with this strategy.

They could potentially go with a multi-die setup similar to AMD's Zen1 or Zen2 where by you make smaller dies that are all identical and combine them together on a single module to create the CPU. If Apple were to do this it would allow for higher yields, higher clock speeds (especially on the high core count part appropriate for a Mac Pro) and lower their costs.

Thirdly scaling up an entire chip for a desktop takes time. There is a lot of engineering they can't just skip over, there is stuff they haven't done even for the iPhone and iPad. For example their current SoC has PCIe lanes and they use NVMe storage on the iPhone and iPad. That's great when you only need 4 lanes but the Mac Pro for example needs 72. This means Apple has to decide do we put 72 or more PCIe lanes into our SoC or do we put say 32 and use PCIe switching chips? - There's trade offs. Also do they move to PCIe 4.0 or even 5.0 (2021 5.0 will be making the rounds in shipping systems from their rivals).

Forth and perhaps the most important. While Apple is dominating in Mobile and their performance eclipses Intel currently (when normalising core count and frequency) there is another chip manufacturer on an unbelivable climb to the top and that is AMD.

What happens if AMD is faster than Apple and they made everyone do all this work switching? What if Apple can only produce a 32 Core part for their first Mac Pro refresh when AMD already today is selling a 64 Core chip? What if Apple can only deliver 72 PCIe lanes or the lanes they do produce are only PCIe 3.0 when AMD today is delivering 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

That is to me the biggest gambit they're taking here. In 2021 when these new ARM macs are supposedly coming out AMD will be delivering Zen4 based EPYC processors that feature 128 or more PCIe 5.0 lanes and 64 Cores+ (the rumour being 72 Cores but if they move to 5nm by then it may be as much as 128 Cores, all over 3GHz and under 250 Watts power consumption).

Anyway, interesting times. Personally if Apple can deliver something that is better then I say they should go for it. I don't think the downsides of software compatability headaches should hold back chip progress.

 

[Varmann]

Better performance is great, however there are a lot of other things to consider at well.

Many people use MacPro to get access to Windows via VMs or bootcamp. This makes Mac a flexible development platform. A move to ARM could change this.

Important software is another factor. Some major players, like Adobe, do not have excellent track record to do quick and efficient platform changes. For a lot of niche programs the future platform change be a bit uncertain.

 

[tonecontroller]

Interesting posts. I am using my 7,1 for music production and am heavily invested in 100s of plug ins. Moving to ARM, these would all have to be recompiled which is a massive amount of work for the companies involved some of which are only very small set ups. Added to the other issues mentioned above, I don't think this is going to happen in a hurry.

 

[1193001]

Better performance is great, however there are a lot of other things to consider at well.

Many people use MacPro to get access to Windows via VMs or bootcamp. This makes Mac a flexible development platform. A move to ARM could change this.

Important software is another factor. Some major players, like Adobe, do not have excellent track record to do quick and efficient platform changes. For a lot of niche programs the future platform change be a bit uncertain.

and the opposite if mac os does become adjusted to arm in the future what would this mean for hackintosh users like myself

 

[ian87w]

That's still an EXTREMELY short lifespan for those that dropped north of $40k! I have $8k into mine, which IMHO is still a boatload for a computer. I guess it's all relative and depends on perspective. For the stupidly wealthy, that is nothing. For the everyday working man, that's quite an investment!

An everyday working man will not even buy/need a base Mac Pro. And the Mac Pro doesn't start at $40k.
Besides, Apple already established their vintage policy way back.

Furthermore, people spending $40k for a computer will probably know what they are using it for. And it's not like the Mac Pro would suddenly stop working when Apple announced ARM transition.

Considering how many people are still running Snow Leopard, seems like it's not really an issue running an older version of macOS. And I don't think you need the latest OS if the current working one is doing the job just fine.
[automerge]1591776027[/automerge]

and the opposite if mac os does become adjusted to arm in the future what would this mean for hackintosh users like myself

It doesn't mean your current hackintosh would stop working, does it?

 

[Quu]

Interesting posts. I am using my 7,1 for music production and am heavily invested in 100s of plug ins. Moving to ARM, these would all have to be recompiled which is a massive amount of work for the companies involved some of which are only very small set ups. Added to the other issues mentioned above, I don't think this is going to happen in a hurry.

It wont be that hard for these smaller developers because people aren't writing things in assembly anymore. Apple will update all their frameworks and it's quite probable any software written in C, C++ or ObjectC will just need to be recompiled in xcode.

If any of your plugins are scripts written in a syntax created by your audio software author they won't need to be recompiled at all and will just continue to work once your audio app is updated. I understand some basic plugins are like this while the more advanced plugins are self contained and executed binaries which will need recompiles.

Back in the day the only way to get ultimate performance out of a computer was to get as low to the hardware as possible. And that meant in many ways bypassing the "one size fits all" frameworks and API's provided by the operating system. But that just isn't the case now, 99% of all the software we use will leverage the SDK's provided by the operating system vendor and this actually makes moving between architectures easier and faster.

Now I don't want to oversell it of course there are still difficulties. ARM is a leaner instruction set, some frameworks that leverage advanced instructions in x86 based CPU's will need to be rewritten to handle that capability. This means frameworks may not have identical features or performance to their prior counterparts. An example of some instructions like this are AVX-512 which the XEON processors found in the current Mac Pro currently features and some apps are already taking advantage of this. If Apple do not include an equivalent that would be a loss that developers who utilised AVX-512 would have to adapt to which would increase development times.

I think we'll probably see the transition being quite smooth compared to the PowerPC to Intel transition. Not a cake walk no, but many small independent developers will find it very easy as these are the ones most likely to stay within the sandbox Apple has provided for them, using official frameworks and such. It's mostly the bigguys like Adobe that would be going outside of that and making their own lives more difficult with regards to this transition.

I think Apple getting rid of 32-bit software was part of their strategy to see what happened in the market. How many developers actually did the work and recompiled their software, how much push back there was from users whose old apps stopped working that sort of thing etc

Many people use MacPro to get access to Windows via VMs or bootcamp. This makes Mac a flexible development platform. A move to ARM could change this.

I wouldn't really say many people do this. Bare metal Hypervisors have largely superseeded this need to run VM's on your workstation. It's becoming more of a niche to host the VM's on your own machine directly and much more common to use containers now, probably 10 to 1 on containers to VM's on-machine actually and of course containers won't have any issue with the processor switch as all the libraries and frameworks underpinning what most people use containers for will all get updated very quickly.

 

[Lepton]

They will start with a single, midrange laptop for us all to start developing on. More models come later.

 

[pldelisle]

Quu thanks a lot. Nice reading. As a software engineer too, I share exactly the same ideas than you.

 

[napabar]

Apple's done this transition twice before. Both times they had a built-in emulator to run the previous architecture's applications. A 68K emulator and a PPC one. I would assume Apple will have to do something similar here.

My 2nd thought is virtualization. I use VMWare heavily for previous versions of the macOS and Windows. A move to ARM will mean this kind of usage will switch to emulation, rather than virtualization. No one's done Windows emulation on the Mac in around 15 years. Connectix is long gone. Will VMWare or Parallels get into the emulation business? Will a new company emerge? Will they want to add, and will Apple allow them to emulate Intel versions of macOS?

 

[Rudy69]

I always laugh when people just bring up something like "No way they can replace my 'real' desktop CPU with a phone CPU!"

There's nothing that makes an ARM CPU mobile only. There's already server ARM CPUs, but as consumers we usually only see the mobile ones. Just the same as a phone x86/x64 can be made too.

Apple has proven they can design some really kickass ARM based CPUs, they are far ahead of the competition in the mobile market. If they can take that expertise and apply it to bigger designs that can be actively cooled, I'm excited to see what they can do!

 

[deconstruct60]

I would imagine apple's new processor would eventually apply to their whole mac lineup. Wondering if that means Mac Pro 7,1 will be phased out sooner or later?

The Mac Pro 7,1 will be phased out sooner or later regardless of whether Apple moves to an ARM processor or not. It isn't a good, long term, solid foundation. It picked up the components it did because was late ( grossly overdue) and Apple needed to get something out of the door. By 2021-22 they'll be significantly better options (even if choose to stay with Intel; which don't have to. )

Does Apple move to ARM mean that the Mac 7,1 will "die off" from macOS upgrade support sooner ( e.g., 2-4 years ) rather than later ( replaced in 1-2 years from now and countdown clock goes 6 years , so 7-10 years ). That isn't clear. It doesn't appear that Apple is going to do a "Big Bang" transition to ARM. Mostly likely they are going to use ARM processors to pursue the Captain Ahab hunt for the thinnest and lightest laptop. So there is a pretty good chance won't even try to do a replacement for the Mac Pro processor for multiple years. As long as they continue to sell the 7,1 the macOS de-support date will slide out. IMHO if Apple goes to push out ARM to the Mac line up then good chance that Mac Pro goes back into "Rip van Winkle" mode where does a whole lot of nothing with it for a substantive number of years ( e.g., the 2014 -> 2019 span for the MP 6,1 . Probably not quite that long but a substantive amount of "do nothing" but trot out some new MPX modules from time to time. ). Mac development resources will be shifted over to doing insanely great laptops and the Mac Pro resource allocation will atrophy again and progress will slow to a crawl because new "big shiny" in Mac line up to focus on.


iPhones and iPad Pros don't need PCI-e v4 (or 5) with large double digit lane bandwidth provisioning. So Apple will probably put very little effort into that themselves. Triple digit GB RAM capacities.... same 'boat'. Somewhere along 2021-22 timeframe when ARM Neoverse gets to "N3" ( Zeus) might take that and perhaps tweak it to slap an Apple Tensor core subcomponent on it and ship with that.

Perhaps my concerns don't make sense, but I wanted to ask the board their thoughts around the future of the Mac Pro with apple's own ARM processor.

Apple's App Store can deliver system specific binaries just fine ( if they unify the App Stores it will be dropping OS+instruction set mixes just fine too). macOS has had "fat binaries" subsystem since day one.

The unit volume rate for the Mac Pro ( and iMac Pro and top end iMac 27" ) is relatively low compared to the run rates that Apple attaches to their other processor variants ( iPhone , Watch , and iPad Pro). Apple track record on assigning large amount of high priority resources on very low volume products is pretty bad over last 6-10 years. The Mac Pro enclosure is built to handle a high TDP CPU package. Not sure what large "value add" an Apple CPU is gong to bring other than uniformity with the rest of the Mac line up. Perhaps a boost in power allocation to the GPU/MPX bays if the CPU were a 50-90W lower. But what is the ARM CPU package suppose to 'buy' ? HUge core count increase ( does Apple even want to do that? Forked kernel scheduler from the rest of the products. )

I think the whole "what is all this extra effort really buying us" is going to slow the roll out for Mac Pro. And small chance that Apple will just say "don't want to do Mac Pro" anymore ( ride the cash cash into the ground for 5-6 years and call it quits.).

 

[satchmo]

That's still an EXTREMELY short lifespan for those that dropped north of $40k! I have $8k into mine, which IMHO is still a boatload for a computer. I guess it's all relative and depends on perspective. For the stupidly wealthy, that is nothing. For the everyday working man, that's quite an investment!

Not to be rude, but someone spending $8K let alone $40K, surely is running a business and should recoup that investment within a year or two.

 

[deconstruct60]

Apple's done this transition twice before. Both times they had a built-in emulator to run the previous architecture's applications. A 68K emulator and a PPC one. I would assume Apple will have to do something similar here.

Technically not true. Apple built no emulator for PPC-> x86. They license a solution from someone else. The only thing Apple "made" there was a new name to slap on top ( "Rosetta" ) so it appeared they actually did the work. It was slightly customized "Quick Transit" that did the emulation that belong to Transitive Corporation at the time. That technology belongs to IBM now. IBM is even less interest in licensing it at the "bargain basement' price that Transitive initially did to Apple for macOS.

Apple hasn't done their own emulator for multiple decades. The notion that they have a deep skillset here in house ready to go is more than a little stretched. Probably closest thing have is the javascript JIT folks and the API emulation do in XCode to run iOS device debugging simulators.

MacOS has a fat binary facility and the App Store can deliver system appropriate binaries. Depends upon how many apps Apple wants to leave "behind". They have just chucked 32-bit apps. So all the zombie apps with no active developers attached got detached there. ( don't have to worry about emulating them). Apple deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL. If switch to ARM turns that into OpenGL/CL apps are dead when ARM variant arrives.... don't have to worry about emulating those older, (possibly developer detached ) apps also. Apple is completely overhauling the kernel driver framework ( so all 'new" drivers needed there for almost everyone over next 1 or so years). Older versions of macOS can be run in a VM in a window. Apple has taken a long list of stuff over the last 3-5 years to weed out the "but need to run an old copy of XYZ in emulation" demand. There is still stuff ( folks clutching Adobe CS6 which you will pry from their cold dead hands)

My 2nd thought is virtualization. I use VMWare heavily for previous versions of the macOS and Windows. A move to ARM will mean this kind of usage will switch to emulation, rather than virtualization.

doesn't "have to". Microsoft just made Windows on ARM virtualize a supported configuration. Can run Windows ARM. ( and Apple could get a free ride on Microsoft's emulator for x86 Windows apps. Zero work done by Apple )

No one's done Windows emulation on the Mac in around 15 years. Connectix is long gone. Will VMWare or Parallels get into the emulation business?

I suspect probably not. Because hardware virtualization can be done on ARM to. Doubtful they'd want to go back to the older stuff. Live migration , virtualize clusters , etc are what really pays the bills at VMWare. Parallels just filling in the blank just for macOS ... would be an odd move.

Will a new company emerge? Will they want to add, and will Apple allow them to emulate Intel versions of macOS?

Oddball combos are being assigned ot QEMU by lots of folks these days.

 

[Zdigital2015]

and the opposite if mac os does become adjusted to arm in the future what would this mean for hackintosh users like myself

It means you need to start thinking about either moving your hack to Windows or purchase a real Macintosh. The Hackintosh movement has about 2-4 years left before it disappears. Ultimately, it depends on how long Apple supports macOS on Intel, but it won’t be more than 5 years and probably less.

 

[napabar]

Technically not true. Apple built no emulator for PPC-> x86. They license a solution from someone else. The only thing Apple "made" there was a new name to slap on top ( "Rosetta" ) so it appeared they actually did the work.

I said "built-in", not built.

doesn't "have to". Microsoft just made Windows on ARM virtualize a supported configuration. Can run Windows ARM. ( and Apple could get a free ride on Microsoft's emulator for x86 Windows apps. Zero work done by Apple )

Nobody cares about the ARM version of Windows, it's the x86 we're talking about. If you change architecture, you have to emulate, not virtualize.