Windows 8 ARM Will Not Support Legacy Software 381
An anonymous reader writes "Intel, speaking out of turn and damaging its intimate relationship with Microsoft, has revealed that legacy x86-compiled software will not work on the ARM version of Windows 8. Microsoft has promised that the Office suite will be available on Windows 8 ARM, but beyond that, nothing. While this means there won't be many compatible apps at launch, it also means this will be the first full-bodied version of Windows that won't (initially) be susceptible to viruses and malware..."
They went further than that (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel went so far as to say that legacy software would "not ever" run on ARM. To do that they have to have to have the stick of software patents to prevent an ARM->x86 emulator.
This is not good for Microsoft. It means their relationship with Intel is irretrievably broken. The WinTel alliance is no more.
As consumers we can win from this. Without the constraint of making the bloated Windows OS run on their chips, Intel can dive into low power. Without the glacial software development lifecycle in Redmond Intel can bring out new stuff faster. That's good stuff.
The distant threat is that when Intel seeks a market they want all of it. They're late to this game and their Atom chips don't cut it yet - their promises are some 24-36 months out, and ARM and Microsoft are not going to be standing still in the meantime. They're promising "best in class mobile video tech" but I swear to God if they buy Imagination Technologies to cut out ARM mobile chipset vendors I'm going to fucking do everything in my power to kill them. That would shift Intel from the "Invention of technologies" camp to the "prevention of technologies" camp. I'm not OK with that.
But if what Intel means is that they're going to let the legacy go and deliver the best low-power chips they can, that's a good thing. Your PC doesn't have to burn the watts it does. There are lots of folk in the third world with valuable input who don't have watts. It does not take a kilowatt gaming rig to work spreadsheets any longer.
.NET (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Initial Viruses (Score:3, Insightful)
won't (initially) be susceptible to viruses and malware
Well, now, I wouldn't speak too soon. There will undoubtedly be a beta release or a leak which will give malware authors ample time to develop zero-day viruses. And with Windows 8 exploring very different terrain this time around, there's bound to be a plethora of exploits just waiting for someone to coax them out of hiding (or plain sight).
Re:Really? (Score:1, Insightful)
"ARM" is not a processor, like "Intel" is not a processor. High-end consumer ARM processors (ARM9 for instance) have something called VFP, which is
Do you think iphone/ipad/android devices do their 3D computations using software floating point ? Are they doing that using fixed point ? You are stuck in the 90's it seems.
Re:first full bodied nonx86? (Score:4, Insightful)
PPC, MIPS, Alpha, IA64 and i860 i believe...
What do all these have in common? Noone used them.
At the time, these architectures offered vastly superior performance to x86, but couldn't run legacy windows apps or legacy apps designed for other OS that typically ran on the hardware. Since there were so few users, virtually no commercial software was ever ported to non x86 windows and very few people ever even bothered to port open source code to them.
MS' biggest strength - proprietary lockin, is also their biggest weakness...
If your going to move to an incompatible hardware platform, and lose access to your legacy software in the process then you'd be a fool to run windows... Linux already runs on ARM, will not lock you in like windows is designed to, costs nothing, and already runs 99% of the same software the x86 version does.
And ofcourse if everyone is running open source code, the architecture becomes irrelevant and we can switch again very easily if something better than ARM comes along.
It's also possible to have a range of architectures for different purposes, ARM or MIPS for low power devices, perhaps x86, IA64 or Alpha for high performance devices where power usage isn't a concern.
Re:they already have windows for arm (Score:4, Insightful)
People who bought netbooks didn't really wanted a netbook - what they wanted was a very small, mobile and cheap version of the notebook computer they used before (hence in the end most netbooks came with Windows). Unfortunately this combination makes for very poor usability.
This is what killed the netbook market and why the iPad is reigning supreme. It takes a while for people to figure out that what they originally wanted from a particular product does not perform as they originally envisaged.
Re:they already have windows for arm (Score:2, Insightful)
And I got it. Twice the speed, twice the ram, half the size, and only 168 fewer pixels vertically.
This just indicates that your hardware replacement rate is a lot lower than that of most others.
There's a reason the current Macbook Air and the iPad are both doing well, they cover two slightly different use cases that people tried to cover with netbooks. The Air covering the "A laptop that's actually mobile, looks nice, has enough power to run all my regular apps" and the iPad the simple mobile entertainment niche (watching a movie in the bathroom/on the train, browsing the web from the couch, etc.).
(Yes, there are other similar products, I just grabbed the two most well-known ones)
Basically, what people wanted was something simple (tablet like the iPad) and ultraportable laptops (that don't cost $2,000+ like ultraportables with anything resembling decent performance used to cost not too long ago),
Re: I think the point here is that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:they already have windows for arm (Score:4, Insightful)