Microsoft is testing a new Prism emulator for Windows on Arm (WoA), expanding the capabilities of Copilot Plus PC ecosystem laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors. With Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27744, available on the Canary channel, Arm-based devices will be able to emulate more x86 instructions such as AVX, AVX2, BMI, FMA and F16C, ensuring compatibility with games and other applications that require high processing power .
Image source: Microsoft
These features are especially important for resource-intensive applications and games such as Starfield and Helldivers 2, which rely heavily on AVX2 and were previously unavailable on the WoA platform. With Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors, WoA-based laptops will gain capabilities that were previously only available to x86 systems. Thanks to the Prism emulator, Arm laptops will be able to run resource-intensive applications running on the x86 architecture, which will allow them to better compete with traditional platforms.
However, this update only supports 64-bit applications: 32-bit software will not be able to take advantage of the capabilities of the new emulator and, accordingly, will not receive support for AVX2 and other instructions. Microsoft warns that this limitation may cause problems with some programs, especially older versions that may need to be adapted to ARM64 to be fully compatible.
Microsoft has been actively promoting the ARM64 platform in recent years, and many well-known applications such as Photoshop, Hulu and Chrome already have native versions for WoA. However, a significant amount of professional software still requires emulation, and even with an updated emulator, some of them function in a limited mode. For example, Adobe is testing Premiere Pro 25 on ARM64 devices and continues to develop a full native version for this architecture.