Apple yesterday announced plans to build future Macs with its own custom silicon chips, and to ease the transition away from Intel processors, Apple revived the “Rosetta” feature that allowed PowerPC apps to run on Intel processors during the PowerPC to Intel transition.
Now revived, Rosetta will allow users to run apps that contain x86_64 instructions on Apple silicon, which means Intel-based apps will continue to work on Macs using custom Apple chips.
Rosetta is meant to provide developers with time to create native versions of apps, and there are a few limitations that are worth noting. As outlined in developer documentation shared this week, while Rosetta will be able to translate most Intel-based apps, it will not work with Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms.
That means Apple’s future Macs with Apple-designed chips will not natively support running current versions of software like VMWare or Parallels to run x86 Windows within the virtualization software. Other native solutions may appear, but will require efforts from 3rd party developers.
Read more at MacRumors.com