When I first started talking to DAW developers about Arm, I encouraged them to compile to Arm64EC. This is 100% native full-speed Arm code, but the stack layout is compatible with Intel/AMD x64. It’s “Emulation Compatible (EC)”
Here’s the post I put in in 2022 explaining how this works.
Arm64EC is a fantastic technology, and something unique to Windows. It’s exactly what DAW developers need.
So, yes, Cubase has been compiled to Arm64EC, which enables loading x64 plugins into Cubase.
Caveats:
- The plugin needs to get on the machine. Many installers work, but some block if they detect Arm64 architecture. You can often work around this.
- If the plugin relies heavily on certain vector instruction sets that aren’t emulated, it may fail or just be slower, like if running on an older processor that doesn’t have that instruction set.
- If the plugin uses iLok, we’ll need to wait until next year for native Arm support.
For plugin developers, I encourage them to release as Arm64X fat binaries. Those binaries contain both Arm64 and Arm64EC versions of the code, so any app running on Arm64 will be able to load them properly.
Hope that helps
Pete