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Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

microsoft.com

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Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#31

Post by kenjackson »

jawee wrote: post #28
kenjackson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How slow? I did some quick profiling of Word and Excel doing basic stuff (text entries, making charts, but no hardcore calculations). Avg CPU utilization: 1%. Peak CPU utilization: 4%. A factor of 10x slowdown would probably be reasonable. Is the current state of the art on ARM able to get it below 10x?

Have you ever tried running Office with a little network latency? The 10x slowdown is barely usable and unavoidably annoying, especially if you're used to a faster computer.

Probably 50% of the time I use office it is over remote desktop over VPN, and honestly I don't really notice it (I really don't notice it for any application except streaming media over RDP isn't great, but surprisingly acceptable).

Maybe we just have really fast networks.

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#32

Post by redthrowaway »

maguay wrote: post #20

So how long will it take hackers to get Windows 8 running on an iPad? Will definitely be interesting...

Why? Putting Android on the iPhone I get, but I don't see too many hackers out there wanting to flip off Apple by installing Windows, of all things.

To put it another way, how many macbook pros are running Win7 solo, aka w/o bootcamp or VMware?

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#33

Post by scdlbx »

redthrowaway wrote: post #32
maguay wrote: post #20

So how long will it take hackers to get Windows 8 running on an iPad? Will definitely be interesting...

Why? Putting Android on the iPhone I get, but I don't see too many hackers out there wanting to flip off Apple by installing Windows , of all things. To put it another way, how many macbook pros are running Win7 solo, aka w/o bootcamp or VMware?

Why? For the sole purpose of getting Win8 running on an iPad.

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#34

Post by kenjackson »

eru wrote: post #30
joshhart wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't. I interned in core operating systems division a few years ago. Managers cared about portability.

Why did they care?

Core OS is expected to go anywhere. x86/x64 today. Itanium/Alpha yesterday. Power for XBox360. ARM for embedded. What is XBox720 going to have?

The HAL was built so that you can retarget quickly. I think people would be pretty upset if it was your team that checked in some code that blocked them from porting to a new platform quickly.

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#35

Post by redthrowaway »

scdlbx wrote: post #33
redthrowaway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Putting Android on the iPhone I get, but I don't see too many hackers out there wanting to flip off Apple by installing Windows , of all things. To put it another way, how many macbook pros are running Win7 solo, aka w/o bootcamp or VMware?

Why? For the sole purpose of getting Win8 running on an iPad.

Fair enough.

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#36

Post by _b8r0 »

I've noticed a lot of speculation about how they will translate code between X86, X86_64 and ARM. Well, the simple answer is not to translate at all. MS have been pushing managed code via things like Silverlight and .NET for some time. My tuppence worth: Windows 8 on ARM won't support legacy x86 code, but will run .NET, Silverlight and any other managed code shamalamadingdong it needs to run. I can see Windows 8 on x86 supporting legacy code, but just as 16-bit support is gone completely in x86_64 Windows now, I'm expecting no support for unmanaged x86 code in the ARM version.

Where all this gets interesting is with things like Mono and Moonlight. If MS goes down this route, they could really be exposed as Mono and Moonlight mature.

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#37

Post by runjake »

wtracy wrote: post #26
runjake wrote: post #2

Interesting that Microsoft's answer to "Why?" seems to be "Because we can." by journalists. Hopefully they have a better strategy than that. That said, I'm all for more ARM support in the world. It looks like it will run .NET apps with little or no reworking. They probably borrowed a lot of the work of the .NET Compact Framework team for a reverse port. Expect native SDKs later, after the initial launch.

MS has learned from their experience with Windows on Alpha. Even when they released XP for x86-64, they initially wouldn't sell it at retail for fear that people would get confused and buy the wrong one. I'm betting they have some compatibility magic cooked up that we haven't seen yet. Emulation has already been suggested. How about the possibility of having a launch hook that recompiles x86 machine code to ARM machi…

Their "magic" is .NET and MSIL.They explicitly stated they aren't virtualizing or emulating x86 code during the session.

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#38

Post by [deleted] »

wtracy wrote: post #26
runjake wrote: post #2

Interesting that Microsoft's answer to "Why?" seems to be "Because we can." by journalists. Hopefully they have a better strategy than that. That said, I'm all for more ARM support in the world. It looks like it will run .NET apps with little or no reworking. They probably borrowed a lot of the work of the .NET Compact Framework team for a reverse port. Expect native SDKs later, after the initial launch.

MS has learned from their experience with Windows on Alpha. Even when they released XP for x86-64, they initially wouldn't sell it at retail for fear that people would get confused and buy the wrong one. I'm betting they have some compatibility magic cooked up that we haven't seen yet. Emulation has already been suggested. How about the possibility of having a launch hook that recompiles x86 machine code to ARM machi…

[deleted]

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#39

Post by dmethvin »

kenjackson wrote: post #25
ssp wrote: post #21

There is the idea that Windows is such a terrible system that the only reason people are staying with it is that they need their legacy applications. It's not entirely without merit, but for a lot of people and businesses, Windows actually works rather well. The importance of x86 is overstated too. Many applications will be pretty close to a recompile away. There is of course the usual chicken-and-egg issue that all…

Enterprise LOB is almost all .NET and web now. Native apps are increasingly just consumer apps.

If Microsoft ported Office/SharePoint to native ARM I might be able to believe this.

Re: Windows 8 to support ARM, System on a chip, architectures

#40

Post by dmethvin »

wtracy wrote: post #26
runjake wrote: post #2

Interesting that Microsoft's answer to "Why?" seems to be "Because we can." by journalists. Hopefully they have a better strategy than that. That said, I'm all for more ARM support in the world. It looks like it will run .NET apps with little or no reworking. They probably borrowed a lot of the work of the .NET Compact Framework team for a reverse port. Expect native SDKs later, after the initial launch.

MS has learned from their experience with Windows on Alpha. Even when they released XP for x86-64, they initially wouldn't sell it at retail for fear that people would get confused and buy the wrong one. I'm betting they have some compatibility magic cooked up that we haven't seen yet. Emulation has already been suggested. How about the possibility of having a launch hook that recompiles x86 machine code to ARM machi…

Microsoft does have a license to customize the ARM architecture, so maybe they are planning some x86 compat layer. It's an interesting technical challenge but what business problem does it solve for Microsoft? This lets them run Windows on other processor, but it doesn't give them a better mobile platform to compete with iPad, for example.
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