[PragmaticPulp]

This speed advantage won’t apply when emulating Apple silicon on an x86-64 CPU, as discussed here.

Emulating ARM on x86-64 is doable, but it has dramatically more overhead. It’s doubtful that a high core count would be enough to overcome this relative to just using Apple silicon.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

My point was that the best use of hackintosh/VM tech is unrelated to "speed advantage". Apple has nothing that can touch a Threadripper for linearly scaled parallel workflows. The gap is so big that it might even overcome the arm/x86-64 emulation cost, though that wasn't what I was suggesting.

[PragmaticPulp]

> The gap is so big that it might even overcome the arm/x86-64 emulation cost

I've spent a lot of time on this. With QEMU, the performance gap is huge right now.

I have several ARM/QEMU virtual machines running on my AMD virtualization server, but the emulation overhead makes everything painfully slow, even when assigning 20+ cores to the VM. I picked up an 8GB Raspberry Pi because it's often faster to run a workload on the Raspberry Pi than even the many-core AMD emulated system.

The emulation overhead across architectures is huge with QEMU.

[dreamcompiler]

Is it not the case that x86 Chromebooks emulate the ARM ISA in order to run Android apps? There's certainly a slowdown but it's not horrible. How do they do it?

Then again maybe they just have a good JVM and that solves most of the problem for Android apps?

[LordDragonfang]

I feel really stupid, because as the (otherwise happy) owner of a well-specced x86 Chromebook, I've always wondered why most people seemed happy with android apps on chromeOS while I find them laggy and buggy messes. I've just realized it's probably an emulation issue.

So, uh, the slowdown seems pretty bad to me.