Other new benchmarks revealed that Apple's M1 Macs are apparently capable of running Windows 10 almost twice as fast as Microsoft's own high-end hardware. According to Geekbench figures, the Microsoft Surface Pro X has the SQ2 ARM processor, which is based on the Snapdragon 8cx. What makes the benchmarking scores interesting, however, is the fact that you still can't run Windows 10 ARM natively on the M1. The developers got around this problem by asking the M1 to run a virtualized instance of Windows 10 ARM. The biggest drawback of virtualized instances is the performance penalty compared to running the native operating system. But as the benchmark shows, virtualized Windows 10 is actually considerably faster than what runs natively on the Surface Pro X.
Numbers game
Last week we reported that you can now run Windows (and Linux) on Apple M1 Macs thanks to Qemu, the open source emulator and virtualizer. An Apple M1-powered machine scored almost 3,000 points higher than the Surface Pro X in multicore tests on Geekbench.
![Puntuaciones comparativas para Windows que se ejecuta en M1 y Surface Pro X]()
(Image credit: Geekbench) Running Windows 10 in a Qemu virtualized environment, Apple scored nearly 5.807 points, while the Surface Pro X trailed behind with 2.891 points. The numbers are even more impressive when you consider the fact that the virtualized environment has not been optimized. Expect the numbers to get even better when Parallels releases its desktop virtualization software for Mac, suitable for the M1. While you should evaluate scores with a pinch of salt, there's no denying the performance benefits of Apple Silicon.