Windows 8 will run on ARM processors as well as x86

[Panzer88]

This is old news by now but at Microsoft's CES 2011 keynote they unveiled that Windows 8 would run on ARM processors and even gave a live demo with allegedly live code running with a Win7 UI doing showing off things like Microsoft Word, and the new system working with an old printer.

To me this is great news. There is also all the news of Intel building GPUs into their CPUs as well as a plethera of other companies making SoC (System on a Chip, yes, it sounds awful to me too)

AMD has their Fusion 'APU' which is essentially the same thing (CPU+GPU) and Nvidia has also gone on record to say they are going to make dedicated ARM CPUs for powerful gaming rigs etc.

This is good because it means more competion, it also means not everything will have to be legacy based anymore either. Also for those who haven't noticed, Apple's A4 propriatary chip used in the iPhone 4 and iPad is an ARM chip. I don't think it would be to much of a stretch to think that they might start putting these in their macbooks to run MacOSX on, especially if microsoft is doing it also. I'm sure it could increase their battery performance. There has been no official announcement from Apple, that's just me speculating.

I'd imagine this is also great news for Linux ARM developers.

in any case, all in all, these are exciting times. To be clear, ARM does not have to mean weak and portable. We still have to wait and see what people come out with before we make judgements.

[Rashidi]

with siginificant difference between ARM .vs. x86 assembly/architecture...
would apps that designed to run on win8 will actually cross platform between x86 & ARM?

or, for win8 MS takes java/flash approach with bytecodes or stuff like that?

[paulguy]

I'm honestly not too interested or excited by this stuff. The GPU on CPU will basically just be onboard video moved from the motherboard to the CPU itself. No great achievement there. It'll probably still be highly proprietary and not user-programmable, requiring the same old video drivers, rather than the ability to program the individual units themselves directly and getting useful parallel processing.

As for ARM CPUs for powerful gaming rigs, they're really going to have to do a lot for this to be useful. Floating point performance on ARM chips as far as I've seen tend to be very weak in comparison to x86, and this will be a rather large performance hit in gaming applications. Many have things like NEON and DSPs/coprocs, but they'll have to figure out a way for these to be useful and have low latency, while keeping the low power benefits.

I think they're just done with much innovation for a while, so they're just grasping at the bottom of a barrel for stuff to market to people.

I'm honestly not interested or impressed with a lot of the stuff I'm hearing about CES this year.

[badinsults]

I imagine all this means is that they want a piece of the portable (ie tablet and phone) market, and their portable OS is just not cutting it anymore.

[Gil_Hamilton]

There is also all the news of Intel building GPUs into their CPUs

Welcome to last year?
Sandy Bridge features a much IMPROVED graphics subunit. It's not a new feature, though.

Also for those who haven't noticed, Apple's A4 propriatary chip used in the iPhone 4 and iPad is an ARM chip. I don't think it would be to much of a stretch to think that they might start putting these in their macbooks to run MacOSX on, especially if microsoft is doing it also. I'm sure it could increase their battery performance. There has been no official announcement from Apple, that's just me speculating.

Apple has no desire to go through ANOTHER major architecture change at this point, I can guarantee that.

I say this with such certainty not because I'm Steve Jobs, but because completely overhauling your platform is expensive and carries a lot of fallout as you break compatibility with older apps if you don't do it very gradually.
They only stopped shipping PowerMac-compatible OSes in August of 09. They shipped their first IBM PC in January of 06.

It took them three and a half years to get to the point where they could stop supporting PowerPC with every new OS release. I guarantee they are not looking forward to jumping right back into that mess.

And speaking of PowerPC... they released their first PowerPC-based Macs in March 1994, and didn't ship a PPC-only OS until October of 1998.


I can pretty much guarantee they don't want to enter ANOTHER 4 years of dual-mode OSes and applications. They've only just gotten out from under that yoke again. Unless Intel flakes out and starts only releasing really slow, really hot parts*, they're gonna stick with making IBM PCs.


*That's the only reason they changed from PowerPC, was because IBM simply wasn't offering them the parts they needed, especially in the laptop setting.