&gt;The question is, did CPU evolve so much it became impossible to translate from one arch to another ?<p>I&#x27;d say software got a bit more complex compared to then.<p>Furthermore, that works if you have controlled hardware (which means easier testing and less edge cases to worry about) and a single transition to worry about (from A to B, not {A,B,C,D,E} -&gt; {A,B,C,D,E}).<p>Can you imagine how insane it will be if Windows shipped a compatibility layer that translates x86 software to ARM, to RISC-V, to MIPS, to whatever? You need to test compatibility for not one but 3 architectures. No way people are gonna do that; the RoI is almost nonexistent.<p>So the only solution is to recompile, which is annoying if you don&#x27;t have the great software infrastructure to do so.