No it's not shaky in any way. Emulating x86 on other architectures has been around for a long time and is perfectly fine. There have been open source emulators for decades, Microsoft does it on ARM Windows as well.
The M-series chips are somewhat different, Rosetta is software emulation but the chips have a hardware x86 memory ordering module, that's partly why Rosetta 2 works so well. Given that they've been out for almost 3 years and there haven't been any noise or legal challenge about this, they're either in the clear license wise or Apple may have acquired the appropriate license to build the memory ordering module.
That's what im thinking, x86 licensing/emulation has always been somewhat shaky in terms of what is/isnt allowed so far as I can tell. Intel released a statement, I think, back in about 2017 where they mention both emulation and defending their intellectual property so I guess something since has changed or that people bypass it in some loophole sort of way. As I said in my initial post not something I have spent a huge amount of time looking at but interesting none the less. I still cant get used to my m1 air I bought. Used it probably 10 times as I needed it for apple configurator, ive tried so hard to like it since but still pick up my windows machines every single time. Need to invest some more time in it i think.
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