Support for Intel?

[hnipen]

Hello team, IS there any change, will the virtualization products in future support Intel virtualization on Apple MAC M1 silicon?

[viking1304]

That will never happen.

[ColoradoMarmot]

It really isn't possible (well, it might be technically, but the cost of doing so would be astronomical).  

If you need intel workloads, you'll need to run an intel machine.   

[Lumbergh]

It might be "difficult", but I don't see how it would be "astronomical" or "impossible" given the fact that macOS itself already runs Intel binary code just fine using Rosetta 2, and that Windows on ARM has been developing an x86/64 emulation layer.

[Mikero]

Apple did some really clever stuff wrt memory store ordering such that it's "easy" to switch between x86_64 and arm64/aarch64 contexts. (Lookup "Total Store Order").

However, emulating the memory layout for user-land applications is _much_ different than emulating an entire set of CPU registers in a generic sense, which is probably why they explicitly excluded x86-cpu-specific virtualization operations.

If you think anyone can do that on macOS better than Apple can (who probably tried and then gave up), on hardware which isn't well documented and where they don't have a partner or OEM program to help, I have a bridge to sell you.

[MagNYC]

Parallels did, didn't they?

[palter]

No, they didn't.

[MagNYC]

Bummer - it would make life so much easier if someone did....

[Technogeezer]

Complete Intel chip emulation is slow on the M1 chip and that's not a fault of the M1. I've tried to run Intel Windows using emulation software (QEMU and UTM).. It works but you won't be impressed with the performance.

I figure that you might see someone do it about the same time as an alchemist finds a way to easily turn lead Into gold or when pigs and donkeys start flying..