MicrosoftYup, everyone here is right.
Emulation isn't necessarily an option, especially for low power low spec SBCs like a Raspberry Pi.
Thom_A is spot on given the recent developments over the past year. Microsoft is pushing Windows support on ARM, all the WinUI and Win32 applications have been compiled to support ARM64 and Microsoft worked with Qualcomm clearly far more than Intel and AMD to get this Copilot+ and NPU feature nobody asked for on ARM64 before x86-64
So if Microsoft is trying to push ARM for Windows then why axe a critical component (SQL server) of developing applications in the Microsoft and .NET ecosystem? Linux has QEMU, Mac's got Rossetta, I guess Windows has Hyper-V? idk about ARM support with Hyper-V, but given Windows Server doesn't have ARM support, well hardly leaves me with optimism.
Regardless, all the above solutions are software emulation with overhead that negates the benefits of ARM.
The message of Windows on ARM feels like "run Microsoft edge and builtin Windows Apps", and axing something like this given the push to ARM is really confusing...
I was primarily looking at this for running my .NET Blazor project on my raspberry pi. Running QEMU emulation of some Windows container with SQL server in x86-64 will have such a massive overhead for a Raspberry Pi it all but negates the point of running it on one. Not to mention the additional complexity of maintaining what is a VM to run the SQL server instance...
Disappointing, I really hope Microsoft re-introduces native support for the ARM64 version Azure SQL Edge 😞
