When it comes to Copilot+ PCs, Intel and AMD have fought the good fight. However, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite has made the most impressive gains in general performance and battery life.

However, there is still one major complaint with these Arm-powered machines: while some of the big apps like Chrome and Photoshop have been rebuilt to support Arm, much of the x86 software is unreliable at best and stuck at worst.

However, a major update to Windows on Arm is being tested in the Insider Preview Build, and Microsoft's Prism emulation engine has been greatly improved to work with more apps and games.

Let's start with the technical details and see what it all means. Currently, Prism emulation for Windows on Arm is limited to certain x86 processor extensions. This means that things like Adobe's Premiere Pro will not work, leaving users in the lurch while they wait for Adobe to create an Arm version

. [This update will support new extensions such as AVX, AVX2, BMI, F16C, and FMA. There are a lot of acronyms, but what this means is that many new applications and games will work here. For example, Starfield is built on AVX2, so it should run on Arm machines.

It is worth noting that while many x86 apps are moving to the newer 64-bit standard, this new emulation update will not allow older 32-bit software to run. In other words, if you want to run legacy apps, you are still out of luck.

What I thought was going to be Microsoft's Apple silicon moment was a more precarious transition than the Mac's move to the M-series chips. This is because instead of Cupertino's small system set and single chip standard, Redmond's team had to accommodate a variety of laptops and chipsets.

The changes being brought to Prism are another major step toward solving this problem for Arm users, and another move toward completing the transition. The silicon wars are starting to heat up again, and time will tell whether x86 or Arm will come out on top.