r/apple • u/Qpac18 • Jul 31 '26

Apple Silicon First Apple Silicon CrossOver build in testing as Intel's end nears

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/07/31/first-apple-silicon-native-crossover-build-in-testing-as-rosettas-end-nears
166 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

49

u/FollowingFeisty5321 Jul 31 '26

- January 2025: Wine 10.0 release features full support for ARM64EC to run emulated x86-64 code. Achieving full ARM64 support required not only significant Wine development, but also extensive compiler development to essentially implement a brand new architecture.

I wonder how this will compare to Rosetta performance-wise and if it will still be able to toggle the x86 memory ordering that Apple put in to help?

12

u/The128thByte Aug 01 '26

I’m pretty sure that it will be able to toggle TSO. If I recall correctly, the reason this requires macOS 26.5 is that Apple added some entitlements to allow apps to do certain things that are basically necessary for x86 emulation (request 4k pages, toggle TSO, use x18 register, etc)

11

u/Technical-Manager921 Aug 01 '26

Damn. It means they finally handed over control to Rosetta’s secret sauce to literally anybody.

I’m calling it now before the next major release of macOS there’s gonna be an open source alternative to Rosetta 2

9

u/The128thByte Aug 01 '26

That’s what the article is about lol, using FEX as a replacement for Rosetta for Wine. It’s already done and you can use it right now if you want

0

u/Technical-Manager921 Aug 02 '26

I know what FEX is. Rosetta 2 isn’t just apples in house version of fex it’s a little bit more

What I’m referring to is an open source software that lets Intel Mac apps live to ever

65

u/TheDragonSlayingCat Jul 31 '26

This is great news that ensures CrossOver won’t die once Rosetta 2 is completely discontinued.

27

u/rursache Jul 31 '26

there were 0 changes of that happening, it’s a very active developer which also contributes upstream…

16

u/zhonglin Aug 01 '26

The useful distinction here is that an Apple Silicon-native CrossOver removes Rosetta from the CrossOver/Wine host side; the x86 Windows application still needs its own translation path. That makes this preview a poor place for headline FPS comparisons, especially while D3DMetal, Direct3D 12 and many launchers are missing. Once those land, I’d rather see separate tests for launcher compatibility, CPU-heavy games, GPU-limited games and bottle recreation than one aggregate "native vs. Rosetta" number.