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Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

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Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#31

Post by ippisl »

6ren wrote: post #28

The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM. Solutions: all providers recompile for ARM (unmanageable). W8 emulates x86 (slow). W8 does very tricky JIT recompilation of x86 to ARM, as if it were a VM (amazing). Launching .Net a few years back means that at least all software written for that is trivially retargeted. A clever (or serend…

Moore's law probably gives them enough speed to use x86 for very old software , .net gives them good results for new software .

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#32

Post by dstein »

This feels awfully late given that Windows CE has supported ARM since 1996. I never understood why Microsoft was reluctant to get a full-blown XP running on ARM (minus the x86 & DOS hamstrings). Windows CE always felt like a precursor to something that Microsoft didn't have the vision to follow through with.

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#33

Post by kurtsiegfried »

brudgers wrote: post #29
wtallis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more like the OS 9 -> OS X switch happening at the same time as the PPC -> Intel transition, but without the old CPU architecture being totally deprecated. Apple's notable for having made 3 major transitions (68k to PPC, MacOS to OS X, and PPC to Intel), but all three of those were as minimal as they could be given the circumstances. The architecture transitions were made with almost completely transparen…

> "Windows as a system is clearly not clean enough at the moment to easily switch architectures without needing a lot of complex compatibility stuff thrown in." Windows currently runs on two radically different architectures...x86/x64 and Itanium. It has for more than nine years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Windows_XP_...

This is true, although unfortunately Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of Windows to support Itanium:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2010/04/02/...

Although the article indicates that support will be rolling around for a while.

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#34

Post by duskwuff »

brudgers wrote: post #29
wtallis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more like the OS 9 -> OS X switch happening at the same time as the PPC -> Intel transition, but without the old CPU architecture being totally deprecated. Apple's notable for having made 3 major transitions (68k to PPC, MacOS to OS X, and PPC to Intel), but all three of those were as minimal as they could be given the circumstances. The architecture transitions were made with almost completely transparen…

> "Windows as a system is clearly not clean enough at the moment to easily switch architectures without needing a lot of complex compatibility stuff thrown in." Windows currently runs on two radically different architectures...x86/x64 and Itanium. It has for more than nine years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Windows_XP_...

It's also run on Alpha in the past, but both the Itanium and Alpha ports are pretty thoroughly marginalized at this point.

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#35

Post by steveb »

brudgers wrote: post #29
wtallis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more like the OS 9 -> OS X switch happening at the same time as the PPC -> Intel transition, but without the old CPU architecture being totally deprecated. Apple's notable for having made 3 major transitions (68k to PPC, MacOS to OS X, and PPC to Intel), but all three of those were as minimal as they could be given the circumstances. The architecture transitions were made with almost completely transparen…

> "Windows as a system is clearly not clean enough at the moment to easily switch architectures without needing a lot of complex compatibility stuff thrown in." Windows currently runs on two radically different architectures...x86/x64 and Itanium. It has for more than nine years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Windows_XP_...

It may run on Itanium, but it doesn't support more than a fraction of the x86 server functionality.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772344(WS.10).a...

I don't see how Microsoft will ever shed the x86 legacy in Windows. Intel would have an interest in killing off arm-based laptops with aggressive pricing, and there really isn't any history of Windows developers rebuilding apps to support other chip architectures.

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#36

Post by brudgers »

maximilianburke wrote: post #23
gpjt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, seriously, Windows failed once on RISC platforms because software vendors were not interested in supporting them. Can an ARM-based Windows desktop function when the only software it runs is Windows? I guess a lot depends on how much developers embrace .NET; .NET apps are compiled to CLR bytecode which presumably could run on ARM devices just as easily as on Intel.

> I guess a lot depends on how much developers embrace .NET; .NET apps are compiled to CLR bytecode which presumably could run on ARM devices just as easily as on Intel. The only problem I think would be with mixed assemblies, those containing both native and managed code, which can exist for PC applications. XNA games for example run on PowerPC (Xbox 360) and ARM (Zune/WP7) but their development is much more constra…

Likewise, iOS applications are far more constrained than OSX applications.

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#37

Post by ssp »

One thing both Google and Apple might be getting wrong is if they won't let developers make serious money. They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps", which might mean that a lot of interesting software will never be written for those systems.

Microsoft always allowed and encouraged application developers to make money from their Windows applications, even though a "cheap applications means we can sell more Windows" strategy would naively seem to make sense.

If I had to pick an OS winner, Android is still the one I would bet on, but with this move, Windows definitely seems to me like a more credible contender.

Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC...

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#38

Post by erik »

6ren wrote: post #28

The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM. Solutions: all providers recompile for ARM (unmanageable). W8 emulates x86 (slow). W8 does very tricky JIT recompilation of x86 to ARM, as if it were a VM (amazing). Launching .Net a few years back means that at least all software written for that is trivially retargeted. A clever (or serend…

I believe that DEC (Compaq?) shipped very capable JIT recompilation of x86 to Alpha a long time ago. They were trying to get past the hurdle of Intel's lock in. It didn't work.

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#39

Post by wtallis »

steveb wrote: post #35
brudgers wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Windows as a system is clearly not clean enough at the moment to easily switch architectures without needing a lot of complex compatibility stuff thrown in." Windows currently runs on two radically different architectures...x86/x64 and Itanium. It has for more than nine years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Windows_XP_...

It may run on Itanium, but it doesn't support more than a fraction of the x86 server functionality. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772344(WS.10).a... I don't see how Microsoft will ever shed the x86 legacy in Windows. Intel would have an interest in killing off arm-based laptops with aggressive pricing, and there really isn't any history of Windows developers rebuilding apps to support other chip archit…

Wow, that's a sad list. It looks like they didn't even port half of the server components to the Itanium, and they warn you not to use .NET for anything performance-sensitive. The closest thing they've got to a modern, portable environment and their first port of it is so embarrassingly slow that they have to warn you on the feature list. Even worse, their modern GUI APIs (WPF) weren't ported at all, so even simple .NET apps are at risk of not working due to not using an archaic GUI toolkit.

Clearly the NT kernel is quite portable. There's plenty of evidence of that (MIPS, PPC, Alpha, IA-64... ). But there's no evidence that even the most modern and supposedly portable components of the desktop experience are actually at all portable. Hardly any of it has (as far as we know) actually been ported.

Re: Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

#40

Post by wtallis »

6ren wrote: post #28

The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM. Solutions: all providers recompile for ARM (unmanageable). W8 emulates x86 (slow). W8 does very tricky JIT recompilation of x86 to ARM, as if it were a VM (amazing). Launching .Net a few years back means that at least all software written for that is trivially retargeted. A clever (or serend…

.NET was a great start on the road towards portability, but it didn't make it very far. Most serious apps that use .NET also end up using native code for some reason or another, be it performance or third-party libraries or limitations of the .NET framework. All you could really say of .NET is that it makes it easier to identify the non-portable bits of your app so that you can rewrite them (or perhaps compile them as fat binaries?) once Microsoft manages to actually port the whole .NET framework, which hasn't been done before.
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