Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by bbgm » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 7:34 AM UTC

erik wrote: post #38

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.

And SGI tried something similar on their MIPS processors. That didn't work either

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

#42

Post by ot » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 9:17 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #16

ot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows phone 7 is based on .NET, so they already have an ARM backend for the runtime.

Have you tried running Office 2010 on your phone? WinMo 6 has a .NET runtime too.

Are you trolling or what? All your posts seem to be based on the assumptions that

a) The ARM architecture is intrinsically slower than x86

b) .NET is intrinsically slow

c) Microsoft wants the same applications that run on the desktop to run on the mobile

Any evidence that backs these assumptions?

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

#43

Post by yason » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 9:32 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #2

Anyone have insight on whether this is Microsoft gunning at mobile platforms, or loosing faith in the dominance of x86?

They've probably seen that:

- ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds; further, there are dual-core and quad-core ARM chips in the near future

- Laptops have been fast enough for years that customers can trade off some speed in favor of much longer battery life

- They see synergetic advances in gluing together mainline Windows and Windows Phone with ARM platforms: ARM is certainly going to be a player, they're certain that ARM based minilaptops, netbooks, and tablets, when they become closer to mainstream, are going to eat away market share from Windows/x86

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

#44

Post by blub » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 9:38 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #25

kes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a stupid question, but that's exactly like the OSX/OS9 switch, right?

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…

Do you have personal exprience with the Windows kernel and user space code base? If so, what makes it unclean?

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

#45

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 10:28 AM UTC

ot wrote: post #42

rbanffy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried running Office 2010 on your phone? WinMo 6 has a .NET runtime too.

Are you trolling or what? All your posts seem to be based on the assumptions that a) The ARM architecture is intrinsically slower than x86 b) .NET is intrinsically slow c) Microsoft wants the same applications that run on the desktop to run on the mobile Any evidence that backs these assumptions?

> a) The ARM architecture is intrinsically slower than x86

Current ARM processors are not designed for speed. I doubt they will be able to outrun x86s in single-thread performance anytime soon. Without faster threads, the machine doesn't feel fast. OTOH, more cores make a machine feel smoother under load, which is very nice.

> b) .NET is intrinsically slow

This is the Java vs. native discussion. JIT and optimization and native libraries go a long way, but I don't see Office being rewritten in C# to run on the CLR. The last massive rewrite to the CLR was during the development of Longhorn and that part was cancelled, resulting in Vista and, IIRC, a two-year launch delay and the retirement of the project lead. .NET and Java (and Python, which is what I use most of the time) are good enough, but I just don't see a major OS rewrite in that direction until writing portable C/C++ and recompiling for each target becomes impractical.

> c) Microsoft wants the same applications that run on the desktop to run on the mobile

This is no mobile platform. If it runs "full" Windows, people will want it to run IE with plugin support. At the very least. People will want Office, games and Photoshop. If it doesn't offer an easy migration (data, programs, skills) they may as well go with iPad or Android that were designed to be that way since the beginning. If it doesn't run Windows software, why build the Windows legacy in?

Also, on your initial post you made the assumption WP7 is runs on .NET, which is mostly incorrect. Microsoft software shipped in WP7 is moslty (if not all) native. What runs under the CLR is 3rd-party software.

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

#46

Post by masklinn » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 10:38 AM UTC

ssp wrote: post #37

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…

> They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps"

Please do explain how. Apple at least (I don't know about the Marketplace, apart from it not being available to a number of developers) has a wide range of available prices, there are GPS software for far north of $100 apiece, and a number of other applications which definitely aren't $.99.

Even in games, "big hits" are generally closer to $10 (when not on sale) than $1 (and outlining this kind of stuff is very much why Apple introduced a third "tops" list in the appstore). And please also explain how Microsoft would solve a race to the bottom which is the combination of users being cheap fucks and developers still wanting those users.

> 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...

Doesn't say anything about iOS, and completely handwaves away the problem for Microsoft (apparently, microsoft "cares that he's making money" and will moneyhat him or something). Garbage.

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

#47

Post by masklinn » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 10:39 AM UTC

yason wrote: post #43

sliverstorm wrote: post #2

Anyone have insight on whether this is Microsoft gunning at mobile platforms, or loosing faith in the dominance of x86?

They've probably seen that: - ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds; further, there are dual-core and quad-core ARM chips in the near future - Laptops have been fast enough for years that customers can trade off some speed in favor of much longer battery life - They see synergetic advances in gluing together mainline Windows and Windows Phone with ARM platforms: ARM is certainly going to be a player, they're certain…

> ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds

Frequencies, not speeds.

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

#48

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 10:40 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #27

rbanffy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows failed on RISC because when x86 proved too competitive I remember distinctly how much faster Alpha-based workstations were in comparison to its Pentium Pro cousins. Unfortunately, I couldn't run many programs I had to (Office, for instance, ran under emulation, at Pentium-like speeds). I could run SQL Server and pretty much that was it. And notepad. And Minesweeper. I can imagine a niche for high-density AR…

But there is the Cortex A-15 which puts ARM in the Intel perf ballgame. Not surprisingly, I've heard grumblings for nearly the past decade of an ARM version of Windows in various states of stability. It will be interesting to see how far along this is. The issue with x86 and clocks had little do with Windows, and more with the Blue Crystal effect (MHz sell CPUs not perf). There's a great insider book about this calle…

And yet, the most popular Windows version couldn't do anything with the dual and quad-processor boxes being sold. Clock number marketing had its share, but the lack of an OS that could run most games or support a lot of the hardware already out (I had a couple gizmos that didn't work under NT) certainly didn't help the evolution of multi-processor x86s. As late as XP-time, most of my friends who were serious about gaming dual booted their boxes between 2000/XP for work and 98 for gaming. For them, a multi-processor workstation would be useless half the time.

For most of 1999/2000, I worked on an IBM PC Server 320 with two Pentium 200 processors and found it was wonderfully "smoother" than the 400MHz P2 (or 3, can't remember that) users who didn't run NT had. I cannot picture myself being happy on a single threaded machine anymore.

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

#49

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 10:42 AM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #34

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

And MIPS, PowerPC...

And lets not forget i860 and the Intergraph Clipper.

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

#50

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jan 05, 2011, 10:45 AM UTC

teyc wrote: post #21

rbanffy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CLR bytecode which presumably could run on ARM devices just as easily as on Intel. It's doubtful if performance would not degrade so much as to make desktop software made to run on the x86 .NET runtime unacceptably slow on ARM.

The most CPU demanding work on a mobile phone is actually the user interface, and on WP7 this is offloaded to hardware. I see no reason why ARM tablets running Windows would be necessarily slower.

I can't imagine Windows 8 as a mobile platform.