Wanted to talk about this a bit. I’ve seen some things showing how well along translation layers have gotten with both proton from windows based games and x86 apps running on ARM. I think it’d be a huge improvement for something like standby time. Although I’m not sure how well it’d be for power efficiency while gaming since it might use the same amount of power for similar performance regardless. Maybe better for low complexity games like balatro or vampire survivors?
I was surprised to discover how simple Windows commands on Linux (via Wine/Proton) are, x86 on ARM is much harder. That said, Apple have managed it pretty well (Rosetta?) so it’s clearly doable.
My understanding is Apple did this by having the more “expensive” to emulate commands be actual hardware, so some commands are emulated/translated, but others are just implemented in hardware on the processor. They could do this because they control the hardware and OS. Microsoft or anyone else trying to get that done is much more of a challenge.
Translation layers are possibile, but from what I can see, are quite unreliable for games (especially more graphically-demanding), which is not of high importance for Apple