Understand this story
Chips and Cheese author Chester Lam published a review on September 10, 2026, using Geekbench 7 to benchmark Windows 11's Prism binary translation, examining the performance loss of x86-64 programs on the Arm platform. Tests showed that x86-64 programs executed roughly twice as many aarch64 instructions after translation as native code, with every core showing performance losses of several generations. Testing was conducted on a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 laptop and on Neoverse N1 and N2 instances on Azure; even while bearing the translation loss, the Snapdragon's E-Cores and P-Cores still respectively outperformed Neoverse N1 and N2. The author also examined the translated code in C:\Windows\XtaCache, noting that Prism performs unnecessary register spills and splits 256-bit AVX operations into multiple 128-bit NEON instructions. This review is currently a single-source report with no subsequent developments.
AI-generated from public reports
Latest development · Report
Benchmarking Windows 11 Prism Binary Translation: Performance Loss of x86-64 Programs on ArmDevelopments
1 confirmed developments
Chester Lam reviews Prism binary translation performance loss
Source:Chips and Cheese
Reports and discussion timeline
Browse reports and discussion by time. Their evidence levels remain distinct.
Sep 10
Chips and Cheese
Benchmarking Windows 11 Prism Binary Translation: Performance Loss of x86-64 Programs on Arm
Chips and Cheese author Chester Lam used Geekbench 7 to benchmark Windows 11's Prism binary translation, finding that x86-64 programs execute roughly twice as many aarch64 instructions after translation as they would natively, with performance losses of several generations across all cores. Testing was conducted on a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 laptop and on Neoverse N1 and N2 instances on Azure; even after bearing the translation losses, the Snapdragon's E-Cores and P-Cores still respectively outperformed the Neoverse N1 and N2. The author also examined the translated code in C:\Windows\XtaCache, noting that Prism performs unnecessary register spills and splits 256-bit AVX operations into multiple 128-bit NEON instructions.