Microsoft Ready To Talk Windows On ARM 342
An anonymous reader writes "After many months of working in secret, Microsoft is nearly ready to start talking about its plans to bring Windows to ARM-based processors. However, while the company is set to discuss the effort at next month's Consumer Electronics Show, there is still a lot that must be done before such products can hit the market. Among the steps needed is for hardware makers to create ARM-compatible drivers, a time-consuming effort that explains in part why Microsoft is talking about the initiative well ahead of any products being ready. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is already starting to ship on some ARM devices and running on many others."
No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not exactly a surprise. Don't produce something for ARM, and it's likely that Microsoft will be left in the dust in the few years on a major platform. I wonder if the NT guts of newer versions of Windows are still as portable as they were a decade ago.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The NT Kernel might be, even after all this time slapping whatever each release thinks is a useful feature into it, but who cares about that. I think I can guarantee Office will not run on ARM, so its pretty much dead already.
Then there's the reason to run Windows at all - the 3rd party apps that are x86 only (many are not even x86_64 yet) and they won't run either. So all in all, this is just fluff. If you want a low-energy server farm full of ARM CPUs (and who wouldn't!) then you might as well run Linux there - many, many server apps run Linux anyway. If you want ARM on the desktop, don't hold your breath, and if you want ARM mobile .. you already have it, even for WinPhone 7.
So, I'm confused. The ARM share price has done well from the rumour, but we'll see what astounding piece of underwhelm-dent gets revealed at CES.
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Who said Office has to run on it? Or at least the full-blown Office. They've got pretty lightweight stuff like Works out there.
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http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/online-services.aspx [microsoft.com] would probably work.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
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It is not that simple. The MSIL just converts the code to win32 calls. Some of these are for more modern versions of Windows that are x86 specific. You would need to rewrite and port part of the win32 apis and MFCs. Sounds like pure torture.
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well, since it might be hard, clearly they shouldn't try to get into a platform that is very likely to see much of the mobile market.
or maybe they already thinking about that:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=30092C39-22D1-4585-8E17-003C1ED00C49&displaylang=en [microsoft.com]
MS is actually getting their shit together. Maybe you should buy a clue?
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
The MSIL just converts the code to win32 calls.
There is a factual error in pretty much every single word in this sentence.
First, MSIL does not convert anything. MSIL is the bytecode. It is what gets converted, by JIT compiler.
Second, it does not get converted to "win32 calls". It is converted to native opcodes on the particular architecture. All "win32 calls" are in the libraries such as WinForms.
Finally, porting Windows to ARM by definition means "port all Win32 APIs to ARM". So even something that P/Invokes a lot would not be affected.
MFC has nothing whatsoever to do with this. It's not a system API, and it's not used by .NET standard class library in any way.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, you're wrong on so many levels!
MSIL doesn't convert anything. It's the code that gets converted. MSIL (more commonly called CIL, for Common Intermediate Language, now that Mono is a working non-MS implementation) is analogous to Java bytecode.
What does get converted (using a Just-In-Time compiler) is CIL to native code. Typically, this native code is x86 or x64, but there are already JIT compilers for ARM as well. After the JIT completes, the result is saved locally so the overhead is only encountered once.
As for Win32 calls, there's no "conversion" at all. What happens is that after the CIL gets compiled to native code, it links into libraries (native DLLs) that implement functions for the OS (such as Win32 calls). For example, if a .NET function calls System.IO.File.Create(), when that code is run, a managed code function gets called, and it in turn calls an unmanaged function in the linked library. That library makes the necessary translation into the native API (let's say Win32 on NT), resulting in an unmanaged call to CreateFile(), which in turn goes into the Win32 user subsystem library and gets translated into a NtCreateFile() system call, which is sent to the kernel.
If you're on another platform, such as Linux, WinCE, OS X, or other, on any architecture at all, the only difference is that you need to write a library that has the same public interface (System.IO.File.Create()) and calls the correct native function on its own platform (open(), for example). The .NET API is large, so it's not trivial to write this layer, but there's nothing specific to Win32 or x86 about it. Mono has already done this (works on Linux, *BSD, OS X, and even Windows) and so has Microsoft (for WinCE).
As for pure torture, have you contacted the Mono devs recently to express your sympathy?
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
It is the same situation as MONO. You can write an app that will run on .NET in Windows and Mono in Linux. Write once and compile for each platform. The problem is it is all to easy to call stuff that wont port. The stark and bleak reality is any .NET app written for win32 or win64 will need major work to run on MONO or .NET-ARM.
As a stupid example. I had to take a Visual Basic programming course. I had to put some output into a multi-line textbox. If I had a choice I would have used a more advanced table control so I could break up the output into columns. Instead, I turned back to my old win32 api programming days and placed a few tab stops into the textbox. This is done with a win32api call, once that is done, the program is non-portable. Any nontrivial app will require some retooling unless it was written from the ground up to be portable.
Without a plethora of win32 apps, Win-ARM will have issues. Even then those apps are not designed for the iPad sized tablet or netbook. Dialog are to large, icons not sized for a touch display. If you Look at WM7 as well as all earlier WinCE stuff, this is not looking good for Microsoft.
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You can write an app that will run on .NET in Windows and Mono in Linux. Write once and compile for each platform. The problem is it is all to easy to call stuff that wont port. The stark and bleak reality is any .NET app written for win32 or win64 will need major work to run on MONO or .NET-ARM.
You miss one very important reason why it's so hard to be portable with Mono. For one thing, it's because it doesn't fully implement all .NET libraries (e.g. no WPF), or sometimes it isn't 100% identical in terms of how it works. More importantly, it's because so many .NET apps use Win32 API directly (via P/Invoke and COM interop).
But here's the thing: neither of those would be a problem on a proper Windows/ARM port. Win32 API would be available in full (just as it was in past non-x86 versions of NT), and s
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Really, why don't you think Office will run on ARM. First off more and more of it is being ported to .Net which we know the VM and runtime libraries are portable so all of that code should just work one ARM. Second any code I have ever seen from Microsoft has been really good about not making assumptions about the size if ints and endianness and things like that which generally cause portability problems. They already have an x86_64 Office that they ship, which is a pretty good sign they could make office
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Not being able to "run Office" hasn't hurt iOS4.
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yes, it has. There market would be much bigger.
And it could run it, but you know the MS / Apple love / hate cycles. Right now it's closer to 'hate' then love.
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It would be love if MS didn't decide to jump on the mobile phone bandwagon. If the company making the OS was split from the one creating the office automation tools, things might have been different. To think it almost [newsmax.com] happened... Sigh.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The NT Kernel might be, even after all this time slapping whatever each release thinks is a useful feature into it, but who cares about that. I think I can guarantee Office will not run on ARM, so its pretty much dead already.
I think all they really care about is whether IE, the .NET framework/Silverlight, and things like Office Live will work on it. ARM devices, if they are keyboard & mouse/touchpad devices, are going to be more likely to be ultralight netbooks or nettops rather than desktop-replacement laptops or standard desktops.
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I think I can guarantee Office will not run on ARM, so its pretty much dead already.
Why not? It's C++ code and runs on x86-32, so it will almost certainly run on ARM with a straight recompile. There's nothing exposed at the C level that's different between the two architectures.
Then there's the reason to run Windows at all - the 3rd party apps that are x86 only (many are not even x86_64 yet) and they won't run either.
Hmm, if only Microsoft had bought a company that made an x86 emulator. Oh, wait, they did. A modern emulator traps library calls, so an x86 app running on an ARM CPU would be running native code whenever it called any DLLs that ship with Windows, including all of the drawing routines and so on.
If you want a low-energy server farm full of ARM CPUs (and who wouldn't!) then you might as well run Linux there - many, many server apps run Linux anyway
And most of those
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
> Why not? It's C++ code and runs on x86-32, so it will
> almost certainly run on ARM with a straight recompile.
And you would be wrong. Microsoft has done ports to MIPS, PPC, Alpha, Itanium and X86_64. The only ports that have been able to run Office is x86_64 because it can run the x86 version and Alpha because that bad bitch kitty had enough advantage over Intel parts of it's day it could run an emulator for x86 at a good enough clip to let folks run Office. ARM can run in the same weight class with Intel parts but has nowhere the performance advantage to consider emulation. So no, it is doubtful Office is going to be up on ARM anytime soon unless MS has been running a secret project for the last few years.
Besides, forget an ARM port of Windows. Ain't happening. Any future commercial OSes are going to be Xbox/iPad lockdowns, not the more open environments we grew up thinking of as operating systems. Once Apple proved 3rd party vendors would give up a non-trivial percentage of all sales the days of allowing customers to install anything they want was dead. Ya want that freedom back? Come to the Penguin.
Xbox games on Xbox 360 (Score:3)
MS Office was portable in 2008 ... (Score:2)
The NT Kernel might be, even after all this time slapping whatever each release thinks is a useful feature into it, but who cares about that. I think I can guarantee Office will not run on ARM ...
I believe MS Office Mac 2008 targeted Intel and PowerPC cpu architectures, that would make it highly portable.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows still built on non-x86 platforms ... (Score:3)
I wonder if the NT guts of newer versions of Windows are still as portable as they were a decade ago.
My understanding is that even though non-x86 retail versions are no longer available MS still built non-x86 versions for internal testing in order to maintain/verify portability of code. It also helps for debugging. A problem that is difficult to reproduce on one hardware platform is sometimes much more apparent on another hardware platform.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
ARM chips use a quarter of the power compared to the Atom chips.
ARM core designs can be licenced and integrated into SOC (system on a chip).
With Atom you need the Atom chip plus a northbridge chip, with ARM you can use a single chip. More space in a mobile device means more space for batteries.
2 or 2.5 GHz is not slow, it's equivalent. (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently you are talking about clock speed, but 2 GHz [infoworld.com] or 2.5 GHz [brightsideofnews.com] is not slow compared to the Intel Atom. The speeds are equivalent.
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody is suggesting ARM as a replacement desktop CPU. But for netbooks and tablets, it's competing against the Atom. And for that it's processing power is in the same ballpark, whilst being much smaller and lower power. That's why Microsoft has to get WIndows running on it. Because they can't make WIndows tablets that are competitive with the iPad unless they do. Not because they imagine ARM replacing X86 on the desktop.
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I've never owned as ARM computer (just C=6502, 68000-60, PowerPC, x86, MIPS, and EE).
Why do you think that matters? There will always be someone how hasn't owned some particular thing, yet that thing can be popular.
Why do you think ARM will be a dominant brand in the coming years
It already is. iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Android...
These devices are projected to outsell traditional PCs in the near future. It's likely that ARM outsells AMD already, and possibly even Intel. Even of not, ARM is already a dominant brand.
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Heck, you don't have to have an Apple i-something to have an ARM either. Lots of more mundane devices use them: printers, DVD/BD players, etc. They're embedded in all kinds of stuff, and are easily the most popular embedded CPU architecture, and have been licensed by tons of companies like Broadcom, Marvell, Samsung, etc. Crack open your laser printer and you'll likely find an ARM CPU in there. Probably your broadband router too.
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ARM sells (or rather licences) more chips every year than Intel has sold in its lifetime.
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You probably own more than one ARM CPU and just don't realise it. They're in most mobile phones. They're in MP3 players, TVs, routers, printers, set-top boxes etc. Depending on who you believe, ARM CPUs have 70-90% of the embedded market.
I think it already is. Around 5 billion ARM CPUs ship per year. Compa
How Dave Cutler got it to work last time ... (Score:4, Informative)
They can just trot down to the Azure lab and ask Dave Cutler how he got it to work last time.
The NT dev team's method is no secret, throw everything out and start from scratch.
FWIW, note "NT" not "Windows NT", it actually started as "OS/2 NT". Back in the day MS was telling people that Windows was a temporary thing for users sticking with DOS rather than migrating to OS/2 1.x plus the Presentation Manager GUI, a 16-bit protected mode environment. IBM was going to do a more expedient x86-only 32-bit version, OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft was going to do a 32-bit portable version targeting various CPU architectures, OS/2 NT. At some point Microsoft decided to split up with IBM and renamed the product Windows NT.
Does this article really need to mention ... (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, many other Linux distros have been shipping on ARM devices since before Ubuntu was a distribution.
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"Meanwhile, many other Linux distros have been shipping on ARM devices since before Ubuntu was a distribution."
I thought Linux was a derivative of Ubuntu! (runs)
"Ubuntu is already starting to ship on some ARM... (Score:4, Informative)
...devices and running on many others."
Eh. Debian has fully supported ARM for years.
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Eh. Debian has fully supported ARM for years.
Indeed - I've been using Debian on ARM devices for at least 12 years. I'm always amused when someone new comes along and assumes a big distro running on ARM is a new thing.
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Join #debian-arm at irc.debian.org, pretty sure they can help.
Re:"Ubuntu is already starting to ship on some ARM (Score:4, Insightful)
Ubuntu is the Arduino of Linux distros.
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I remember seeing Linux running on Netwinders sometime around 1998.
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That's nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
But Windows' main (and practically lone) selling point is that it works with all your old software. If they rewrite it for ARM, it may say "Windows" on it but it won't run your apps or play your games.
And I'm sure users will enjoy discovering that after they buy "Windows" tablets and netbooks.
Re:That's nice... (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has already stopped supporting a good deal of its legacy software with the 64 bit editions of Windows (no more DOS or Win16 support). Quite frankly, I don't think supporting legacy software is as big a deal as it once was. Write everything under the .NET platform and it isn't that big a deal. Yeah, your old games won't work, but I'm wagering a lot of folks running Windows-for-ARM are not exactly going to be looking at running that old copy of Office 2003 anyways.
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Microsoft has already stopped supporting a good deal of its legacy software with the 64 bit editions of Windows (no more DOS or Win16 support).
Not quite - you can still run those virtualized in XP Mode.
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x86 is such a funny architecture. If you've ever done operating system development in x86 it's crazy to see how much old crap there is in there from the 80s. Real Mode! Hello? Not to mention such inglorious hacks as getting the keyboard controller to reset the CPU!
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But Windows' main (and practically lone) selling point is that it works with all your old software. If they rewrite it for ARM, it may say "Windows" on it but it won't run your apps or play your games.
And I'm sure users will enjoy discovering that after they buy "Windows" tablets and netbooks.
I would be very, very surprised if they would port Windows to ARM and *not* include something like Apple's Rosetta. Sure, you take a performance hit when running legacy, crusty apps, but considering that those were probably designed for much slower computers originally it hardly matters if you're running them with a hefty performance penalty now. I know I was quite pleased with the PPC -> Intel transition process on my Macbook Pro.
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ARM is a RISC design. It's easier to emulate CISC on a RISC than RISC on a CISC.
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Uhm, because it's a different CPU instruction set?
Is there some joke I'm missing here?
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There's a lot of things that won't run under Rosetta. Besides, Rosetta was emulating a RISC architecture on higher-powered CISC chips. This would be emulating a CISC architecture on lower-powered RISC chips. Good luck.
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china's MIPS clone has x86 emu assist. Not ARM though!
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No?
That's not how OSes work at all. They mediate programs accessing hardware, not do all the work for the programs. They control what program gets what memory (and if things are in RAM or virtual memory) and take care of getting things from the hard disk, etc. But software runs directly on the processor. That's (part) of what virtual machines do.
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Which is why Apple wrote a translation app called Rosetta to enable PPC-only binaries to run on Intel Macs (while pushing for universal binaries, since using Rosetta is obviously slower). It wasn't quite full emulation like a VM - just a dynamic translator, so it had some limitations but it was pretty successful in most cases.
I have no doubt the same could be done for x86 software written for Windows.
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The advantage ARM has over x86 is that is much more efficient when it comes to power requirements. This comes at a trade off in regards to speed. When Apple went Intel they had at least equivalent processors, and Rosetta often was quite a bit of a dog.
Running an x86 emulator on ARM doesn't sound like a very good idea at all. Binaries made for very fast processors running emulated on a slow processor would be a bad user experience, and there's quite a lot of evidence that in the mobile space the average pers
Re:That's nice... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple wrote a translation app called Rosetta
No, they didn't. They licensed it, from a company that is a spin-out from Manchester University. The same software has also been licensed to a few UNIX vendors to allow them to run legacy code on other architectures (and, in a few cases, to help customers move from a competitor's system).
It wasn't quite full emulation like a VM - just a dynamic translator, so it had some limitations but it was pretty successful in most cases
It wasn't at all like a VM. The thing that made it perform well was that it was the opposite of a VM - it emulated as little as possible. It provides a mechanism for including stub libraries, which trap out of the emulator. When you call a function in one of the stub libraries, it tweaks the arguments (swapping byte order and so on) and calls the native version. Since a typical program spends a significant proportion of its time in third-party libraries, this means that even a relatively poor emulator[1] can achieve good performance, because all of the time spent in Apple-provided libraries is spent running native code. This includes all of the Cocoa frameworks, CoreGraphics, and so on. Complex things like text layout and antialiased rendering are all done in the native code.
Microsoft could easily license the same code and include it with Windows. Almost anything in a system DLL would be native. For a typical app, this is quite a lot of the total run time.
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But (program speed) performance from PPC->x86 is likely much better than x86->ARM
In general, it's easier to emulate a CISC architecture on a RISC architecture than the other way around. This is because CISC instructions are generally equivalent to short sequences of RISC instructions (and are microcoded as such), so you end up using the RISC-like subset of a CISC architecture when going the other way, which is not ideal.
Emulating x86 on PowerPC (which VirtualPC did, and at a decent speed - things like bzip2 in an emulated Linux install were well over 50% native speed) was made a lot
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Well, Java apps and Perl scripts are more data than program (yes I know about JIT.) Which should illustrate to you how a different architecture could provide the mechanisms for running legacy code. Hell, outside of the mobile market the runtime compiled code could be saved and then used in lieu of the foreign code on future invocations. The very good chunk of software would run just fine in that kind of environment. Even drivers could be implemented this way if so desired (barring any timing loop issues.)
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The OS does abstract the hardware to some extent but in almost all cases the application code still runs directly on the CPU (with the CPU running in an "unprivileged" mode so the user code can't just do what it likes).
It IS possible to add CPU emulation to an OS, indeed it's been done at least three times I can think of in operating systems from major vendors. However it carries a significant performance penalty.
The performance penalty is tolerable if your new architecture is faster anyway and you don't ca
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The OS provides an API layer at the code level, that is if you have source code you can usually recompile it to work on different architectures...
This works well on Linux, because the source code for most applications is available making it easy to port apps to other architectures... On windows, the sourcecode for most apps is not available and the owners of most of this source won't recompile their apps unless there is a sufficiently large market for them, and will usually take quite a long time to do the
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There are many security weaknesses that are externally exposed design flaws, and could not be dropped... Such as the use of weak password hashing types which are integral to the networking protocols (google for pass the hash).
If they fixed this, you would lose the ability to use most of the ms networking protocols.
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but if they were written correctly this should not really be much of an issue.
Even open source programs that are intended to run on multiple platforms suffer from developers fixing stuff for theirs and unintentionally breaking stuff on other platforms. If you've ever done it, you know it's actually a major issue unless you write very good code without shortcuts/optimizations or you write in an interpreted language.
Microsoft should be able to get Office to run on ARM without too much hassle, even then the Mi
About time (Score:2)
If they want to keep relevant on cheap, portable devices - they'd better support ARM.
Even the atoms use a lot more juice, and for simple appliances ARM can be enough horsepower.
Although - they might be advised not to put too much into it, as I don't think there will be much margin on SW for $200 devices and whatnot... And good luck with getting manufacturers to make ARM drivers, I think they'll be needing it.
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And good luck with getting manufacturers to make ARM drivers, I think they'll be needing it.
They shouldn't even need to bother doing that. They'd be better off if they get with the program: Slap their user space on top of the Linux kernel (which already has all the ARM drivers). That's what Google did with Android.
All the old x86 Win32 API apps won't run on ARM anyway, so the Windows kernel won't enable their traditional strategy of leveraging the installed software base. Instead, Microsoft should just port their .NET runtime onto an ARM Linux kernel and call it a day. A lot of modern Windows soft
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Thereby making it almost trivially easy to produce a binary-compatible clone.
Why? (Score:2)
Why port it to ARM and talk about it if there's no clear strategy or reason for doing so?
It's odd that Intel are trying to get people off ARM and onto Atom (low power x86) while Microsoft are thinking of moving people from Intel to ARM.
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Precisely. Besides, any project to produce an ARM-capable version of Windows means that they have a fully portable OS, and are no longer tied to Intel. They tried this in the early 1990s, but Intel's penetration was so great that it didn't make sense to continue putting resources towards Alpha and PowerPC ports. Times have changed, and the proliferation of ARM-based hardware out there is immense.
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Why port it to ARM and talk about it if there's no clear strategy or reason for doing so?
My guess is the strategy and reason for doing so is to encourage device makers thinking about, e.g., ARM netbooks to hold off on committing resources to things like Chrome OS (which Google has made it quite clear they want to be on ARM devices as well as the initial x86 devices) and Ubuntu.
My guess is that Chrome OS is the big trigger, from timing and the fact that Chrome OS is being actively and heavily promoted by a well-funded company that is clearly focussed on competing with Microsoft on a wide range o
Nahh (Score:4, Insightful)
Usual Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't Microsoft always talking about initiatives well ahead of products being ready?
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Among the steps needed is for hardware makers to create ARM-compatible drivers
That's really Microsoft's problem, not the hardware makers.
Windows Phone 7 (Score:2)
As countless articles have already pointed out, it's extremely strange for Microsoft to start "porting" or whatever Windows 7 [embedded|CE|whatever] to ARM. They made a touch interface, they supposedly think it's awesome.. why aren't they using it?
Talk about fragmentation.. This is just making development/platform targeting even worse, with no gain.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Worse than fragmentation is proves what I've been saying (and getting modded "troll" for it) that Microsoft is a Windows company, not a technology company. Everything they do is trying to leverage Windows. Windows on ARM may just be the stupidest thing they've done. It is as if to say "Me Too On Arm" just to say it.
Someone needs to fire the board, the top managers and start making some real gutsy calls on direction of the company, or else Apple will eat them for lunch as they keep chasing what Apple and Google have already done.
I'm kind of feeling sorry for the once great giant these days. They just can't seem to get things right.
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Apple and Google aren't eating Microsoft's lunch. Admittedly Microsoft isn't so dominant as it used to be, but this is supposed to be a good thing for consumers, right? Not a cause for alarm.
In their most recently reported fiscal quarters:
Apple revenue of $20.34 billion, net profit of $4.31 billion
Google revenue $7.29 billion, net profit of $2.17 billion
Microsoft revenue $16.20 billion, net profit of $3.25 billion. Revenue was a MS all-time quarterly record, in fact. And the profit shattered estimates a
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Why Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why are they trying to keep Windows? Yes it's a well-known brand name, but so is Microsoft. All they have to do is create a tablet-specific OS and leave all the compatibility headaches behind. And even without any compatibility headaches, most Windows applications weren't written with a touch interface in mind, so having a goal of Windows on a tablet is just asking for trouble.
Microsoft has an opportunity to start fresh, leave the Windows problems behind and create something new. But yet they don't.
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And even without any compatibility headaches, most Windows applications weren't written with a touch interface in mind
Are you missing the part where it will be using ARM CPU's, thus what "most windows apps" are doing is moot?
This is like pointing at a Linux tablet and asking "Why are they trying to keep Linux?"
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And even without any compatibility headaches, most Windows applications weren't written with a touch interface in mind, so having a goal of Windows on a tablet is just asking for trouble.
ARM is not the same thing as touch. Google has been rather upfront in that while the first consumer netbook for Chrome OS following the Cr-48 pilot device will, like the Cr-48, be Intel devices, they really want to get hardware partners for ARM-based Chrome OS netbooks, as well, and eventually they want to deliver (via the Portable Native Client technology now in development on top of the existing x86/ARM Native Client that allows platform-specific native code to run in the Chrome browser) "native" Chrome O
Pushed by Chrome OS? (Score:2)
With the Chrome OS hardware/software in a kind of semi-public test phase with fairly imminent general release, even though the initial hardware (both the Cr-48 and the announced initial planned consumer units) is x86, there is some pressure on MS, since Chromium OS -- including Native Client -- as I understand is already working on ARM and Google has stated that they intend to work with hardware manufacturers to get branded Chrome OS delivered on ARM devices.
Announcing plans for Windows on ARM is potentiall
With such an excellent track record.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Microsoft ports software to hardware that will sell it. They aren't discontinuing Itanium support because they don't take it seriously, they're discontinuing Itanium support because the industry doesn't take it seriously, and therefore doesn't buy it, which makes it kind of pointless to sell software for it. Notice anything interesting about the architectures you mentioned? None of them are used in PCs or workstations anymore, and most of them haven't been in years (a decade or more, for many).
I have a frie
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Mac Office has been out since 1989. It ran on the Motorolla 68000 and later the IBM PPC.
*Hopefully* pointless effort. (Score:2)
Microsoft's success with end-users is almost entirely predicated on compatibility for third party software. Windows for ARM would not be able to execute Windows for x86 code in any reasonable way. MS would want to have stringent licensing restrictions at significant cost while Google just doesn't care or have reason to care and will let OEMs do what they will. For end-users, no benefit is available from Windows, for manufacturers, the software is an expense that is not recoverable via crapware preloads l
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I will also say that this is another reason why not to set desktop expectations on ARM devices given a chance to reset. Why offer major upgrades via retail at all rather than only with purchase of new devices. Now *there* is a way to really win over manufacturers. Android already exhibits this behavior to a large extent with locked down devices, so this may be a lost cause no matter how they position it.
Until marketing gets wind of it (Score:2)
Then it will only run one program at a time and be issued in 4 versions.
AD/Printer servers, IIS (Score:3)
I see a gap in microsoft's product line. Its small branch offices where a traditional server is overkill in power usage and expense.
If microsoft were to produce an ARM version of server2008r2 that was able to provide a full AD DC role, print server role, WSUS or IIS as a single role server on a lighter ARM box they would kill.
If you could get a single role, or single primary role such as a AD DC + print server, or IIS + WSUS, at a more fitting price for a low power machine, then AD would find many more homes in small offices.
Considering that ANY full size server is going to chew up 250W, and 350W more often than not, a 100W ARM server, redundant hard disks included, would be a significant savings in expense. 250W*24hours*365 = thats ~2.2MW or around $250, the ARM server would be $150 per year cheaper. Now do 2 AD DC, 1 IIS + WSUS, and 1 fileserver your at 1.25KW*24*365 thats 11MW or $1200 vs $300-$400 for the arm. Microsoft should also license these out at a reduced price (1/2 I think) but keep CALS the same price.
There are many roles that just arent worthy of an entire machine and shouldnt be put in a VM. A backup server for DPM for instance. Doesnt need much horsepower, just diskspace, server 2008r2, and the DPM software. PERFECT for a small ARM platform like a dual core 1.5-2Ghz.
Re: (Score:3)
And yet many *nixs through the last few decades have managed to port to other architectures. Heck, Linux can be compiled, so it's hardly that big an issue. NT was supposedly built to be portable and crossplatform from the very beginning, and in a way, we already seeing two architectures with 64-bit versions of Windows.
At any rate, the failings on the Alpha had nothing to do with architecture, and everything to do with the fact that, by and large, the Alpha platform failed. If Alpha had in fact taken off
Re:ARM now? (Score:5, Interesting)
NT was actually more stable on Alpha than it ever was on x86...
Drivers are not really a problem for ARM, since most of these devices will be small (tablets, netbooks etc) with fixed hardware, the hardware manufacturer will supply the necessary drivers.
The problem is apps...
Existing windows apps would need to be at the very least recompiled (or may require significantly more work depending on the code), and with most apps being closed source only the original vendor is in a position to do that... Now as with alpha, ppc mips and ia64, commercial vendors won't port their apps unless they see a market for them... And end users wont buy the platform unless they see available apps, catch 22.
Linux doesn't really have this problem because the vast majority of applications are open source, and have already been compiled for multiple architectures. If the original author hasn't ever tried to compile the app for another platform, chances are one of the distributors has (debian has been supporting arm cpus for years)...
The only advantage ARM has over alpha/ppc/mips/ia64 is cost of hardware, if those platforms had been price competitive with x86 they would have had a lot more sales to linux users (i know many people who wanted an alpha but just couldn't justify the cost).
There is a lot to be said for writing new applications which are actually designed for a tablet or netbook, rather than trying to shoehorn desktop apps onto small devices with different input methods... But if you're going to write new apps, why bother writing them for win32/arm instead of simply writing them for linux?
The only advantage windows has in this area is familiarity, they would lose their traditional selling point of compatibility/lockin, if you go arm you will need new apps regardless and if people have learned anything over the past 15 years they should take this chance to break free of the lock-in rather than getting caught up in another round.
Re: (Score:2)
NT was actually more stable on Alpha than it ever was on x86...
Alpha NT was the best you could get at the time for Windows, but the FX86 or whatever software DEC offered to translate x86 to AXP can be very annoying, and after a while, not worth the additional hardware stability. The main benefit I got was that because I couldn't play very many games worth a damn, it got me off the game upgrade cycle so the computer lasted me eight years before I gave up, instead of two before I wanted to do major upgrades for the next game. I replaced it with a used Intel-based works
Re: (Score:2)
sigh.
It's for the mobile platform. It would be a different set of apps.
Not the recompiling is really the difficult.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:ARM now? (Score:4, Insightful)
But if you're not going to run anything which is tied to windows, then what's the point paying more for windows?
Linux runs a browser, java, flash, vpn, rdesktop and a media player - and it costs less than windows. Backwards compatibility is about the only selling point windows really has.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is apps...
Apps are not going to be a problem when you are porting from an OS with a 90% share of the market as whole.
Mobile vs. Desktop (Global) [statcounter.com]
Mobile vs. Desktop (North America) [statcounter.com]
if you go arm you will need new apps regardless and if people have learned anything over the past 15 years they should take this chance to break free of the lock-in rather than getting caught up in another round.
Lock-in never seems to trouble anyone but the geek.
Top 5 Operating Systems (Global) [statcounter.com]
Top 8 M [statcounter.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The kernel (for Linux) is cross-platform and only requires minor changes (the x86-bits). The same could be said for NT if NT hasn't done major x86 optimizations or ASM code.
The main problem is the applications. You can't just take a random app in Linux and put it on an ARM-based system. Some will cross-compile if the developer wrote very good code or if you're willing to do minor changes, others are written in interpreted languages like Perl. But besides that, the applications are limited.
And if you're goin
Re: (Score:2)
Windows CE (now called Windows Embedded Compact, for some confusing reason)
Probably because it avoids the natural abbreviation of Windows CE to WinCE, which is undesirable (from Microsoft's perspective), given what the word "wince" means in the English language.
Re: (Score:2)