Microsoft releases ARM64EC 17.3: Windows 11 on ARM ushered in full support

Microsoft releases ARM64EC 17.3: Windows 11 on ARM ushered in full support

Microsoft releases ARM64EC 17.3: Windows 11 on ARM ushered in full support

Back in June 2021, Microsoft announced ARM64EC for Windows 11.

Officially it’s a new way to make existing x64 applications get near-native performance on the ARM platform — even if you call plugins and dependencies that don’t yet support the skeleton.

A year later, ARM64EC finally ushered in more complete support for Windows 11.

It is reported that the “EC” of ARM64EC is the abbreviation of “Emulation Compatible”.

The idea is to provide a binary interface (ABI) for developers to build applications using x64 and ARM code.

This means that ARM code runs natively on Windows 11 devices, while other x64-specific code runs through emulation.

Screenshot (from: Windows Blogs )

As an important milestone of the Windows on ARM project, the differences between the ARM64EC ABI and the ARM64 ABI are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

• The ARN64EC ABI is binary compatible with x64 code and follows established x64 software conventions.
• These include calling convention, stack usage, and data alignment.
• This makes ARM64EC and x64 code interoperable, and applications built on the former may contain x64 code, but not all.
• Because ARM64EC itself has a complete set of first-class Windows binary interface (Windows ABI).

After more than a year of development, Microsoft now believes that the ABI is stable enough to transition from experimental to general release ( GA ).

With the introduction of ARM64EC version 17.3, it can bring many benefits to developers.

For example, developers can incrementally update their code to run both x64 and ARM features without having to worry about ensuring that their entire codebase is compatible with the ARM platform.

Of course, on Windows on ARM devices, the performance of native ARM code is slightly better.

However, Microsoft’s idea is to improve ARM performance through continuous code base updates, but not lose any features in the process.