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ARM-based processors have great potential to improve performance per watt on our PCs, but the biggest obstacle to adopting the technology in laptops and desktops has always been a lack of application compatibility. For many photographers, the lack of native ARM support in Adobe Lightroom would make the switch to an ARM-based chip impossible.
That is being significantly mitigated today. Adobe announced today that the latest version of Lightroom supports Apple’s new M1 and ARM chips in Windows 10, suddenly making these devices much more viable alternatives for photographers.
However, to be clear, only the modern version of Lightroom supports ARM. Lightroom Classic, which many, if not most, photographers continue to trust, still doesn’t run natively on ARM (you can still run it with a performance hit on Apple’s M1 chip). Still, it could convert more photographers on Windows to devices with ARM chips like the Surface Pro X.
While Apple’s Rosetta software can translate applications designed for x86 hardware (Intel and AMD) relatively efficiently, the ARM chips in Windows 10 cannot yet emulate 64-bit applications like Lightroom. There’s a lot of software running exclusively in 64-bit mode these days, and while Microsoft intends to roll out support for x64 emulation next year, that’s a long time without your favorite apps.
Native ARM support is naturally the best solution, potentially offering better performance and / or battery efficiency than software can currently achieve on x86 chips. Photoshop, for example, currently offers ARM support in beta, and it has performed admirably on the Surface Pro X that I am testing so far.
One of the indirect benefits of Apple’s switch to its own silicon is that it has sped up developers by adding support for ARM processors. Ultimately, this also bodes well for Windows; We hope that Lightroom Classic will eventually get native ARM support as well.
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Posted Dec 8, 2020 – 23:58 UTC
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