What would happen here is that emulation software (say, QEMU, a popular open-source emulator and virtualizer) would translate x86 instructions to ARM instructions (usually on-the-fly) so that an x86 operating system could run on an M1 Mac. And in fact, Apple specifically says that Rosetta 2 cannot be used with virtualization software. This is a great technique but it doesn’t really work at a virtual machine level. They do an entire app translation on first launch (and also re-do it at times) and then run the translated app. In general this is what Apple is doing with Rosetta 2 on Big Sur to allow your x86 Mac apps to run on an M1 Mac. So some translation or emulation needs to happen. Which is what makes it so easy to run Windows 10 x86 on an Intel Mac - they both are using Intel CPUs with the same instruction sets.īut what if the instruction sets differ as they do with Intel and M1 Macs? Obviously you can no longer pass an x86 instruction to an M1 chip and expect anything to happen. This allows the instruction to be passed through the VM to the CPU and allows for good performance. These virtual computers run an operating system (OS) of some kind and in most cases this OS has to have the same instruction set as the host computer. Second, there are the instruction sets for the computer and OS. First there are virtual machines, which act as virtual computers running on a main or host computer. If you are new to all this, it is important to understand the parts involved. So what challenges do the M1 Macs bring in this regard? With the newly released M1 Macs, there have been lots of questions about being able to run other operating systems on it, particularly from developers that are used to running Window or Linux in Virtual Machines using virtualization on their Intel Macs.

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