Microsoft porting Windows to ARM platform?

theheyes

theheyes

theheyes

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Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, will announce a version of its Windows computer operating system that runs on ARM Holdings Plc technology for the first time, said two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans.

The new product will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, said the people, who asked not to be identified because Microsoft’s plans are confidential. The software would be tailored for battery-powered devices, such as tablet computers and other handhelds, the people said
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...ion-of-windows-for-arm-chips-at-ces-show.html

About time in my opinion. Not necessarily the porting to a new hardware platform, but showing signs (finally) of taking the slate/tablet market more seriously.

Having used a Windows 7 tablet recently, within half an hour I had a USB keyboard and mouse plugged into it because the touch UI was such a chore. As much as I like Windows 7, it’s not a good tablet OS. Call me a quitter but I was in a hurry.

I just hope they don’t simply try to shoehorn a desktop OS onto the mobile platform again. I was hoping MS would try expanding Windows Phone 7 OS into the tablet market, but it seems as though they are sticking to their guns. Where Apple see tablets as an extension of their mobile platform, MS quite clearly see them as an extension of the PC and therefore choose their operating systems accordingly.

It will be interesting to see whether Windows 8 turns out to be the one size fits all OS for desktops and tablets. It would certainly put some weight behind Ballmer’s “riskiest product yet” comment.

Anyway, as long as it doesn’t lead to a thousand-thread “do I need Windows 8 ARM Edition 32 bit?” scenario we’ll all get off lightly.
 
to be honest I doubt that it will happen with the desktop version, what I can see happen is MS release a conversion app so that x86/x64 can be recompiled for arm and windows CE7 (or whatever version is out now) easily and without the coder needing to learn new coding etc
 
I cant remember where I read it, but I am sure I read an article about MS have always had an ARM version of windows XP, Vista, 7 all had one they just never released them.

Kimbie
 
They announced it at CES, Consumer Electronics Show. So it is safe to say that this is nothing to do with servers.

The thought of a lowly ARM CPU trying to run server software is not pleasant actually :D
 
Anything new that can run .NET code has a lot going for it, but I do hope there's little trace of the normal Windows UI. It's fine where it belongs, but reusing it on mobile devices is deeply uninspiring.
 
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They didn't comment on UI elements, confirm how x86 apps will work on this new Windows version because they must have a trick somewhere and it can't be virtualisation because ARM CPUs aren't meaty enough to do that.

Also drivers will need to be written by mobile device makers for this new version as well.

It could be great or it could be hmmmm.....I think it might turn out great, a Windows 8 tablet running seamlessly in a home network is quite the thing I want to see but I fear that some makers will fall fowl of updates in relation to drivers and so on.

Look at Samsung and the Galaxy S with their updates, update pulls then re-updates to fix bugs, and that's on Android! I think some makers will get sloppy with spit-polishing.
 
I remember when ARM had the quickest desktop CPU on the market. Nice to see them making a return.

Lightnix said:
I imagine it has something to do with ARM's recent push into the server market:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4199515/Dell-IBM-give-thumbs-up-to-ARM-servers

Microsoft naturally would much rather have those servers be running Windows Server 20xx than a *nix OS and if the market is big enough (since Dell and IBM are involved, it probably is), they'll go after it.
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Probably. If they're porting their server software to ARM it would be daft not to port their closely related desktop operating systems too, especially when there's money to be made in the netbook/tablet market.
Like Khaaan said, I just wonder how they're going to make x86 apps run on these.

NathanE said:
The thought of a lowly ARM CPU trying to run server software is not pleasant actually :D
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10,000 MIPS at 2Ghz and only drawing 1.9W of power, from a quad core processor.
A cluster of those could quite easily run a relatively high-demand server, and do it with magnitudes more power-efficiency than your average CISC based solution.
 
I believe Intel already have compliers to move x86 code to other architectures, so recompiling a x86 programme to work on ARM chips should be fairly straight forward.

Kimbie
 
"Move x86 code to other architectures" makes no sense.

C and C++ compilers simply take the source code and then produce a binary in whichever instruction set format you want. x86, AMD64 aka x86-64, ARM etc. Hell you can even tick a box if you want it to output MMX, SSE instructions etc. This is nothing new. Microsoft used to support Itanium and Alpha CPUs in both their operating systems and Visual C++ compiler. But those architectures fell out of favour and were dropped.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12124887

In this video the guy quite clearly explains that there is no virtualisation occuring at any level. He said they recompiled Microsoft Office, recompiled a printer driver etc to use the ARM instruction set. And then it's more or less a case of "hey presto". One observation from the video is that it does appear very slow. So either they still have a lot of compiler optimisation work to do or the performance of these ARM chips is rather dire. I'm expecting the latter.

The Windows NT kernel was designed from the outset to be able to shift between architectures like this almost at a whim. So nobody should be surprised that Microsoft has done this. To an extent the support for AMD64 that they added a few years back would have been a far bigger challenge.
 
Spyhop said:
Anything new that can run .NET code has a lot going for it, but I do hope there's little trace of the normal Windows UI. It's fine where it belongs, but reusing it on mobile devices is deeply uninspiring.
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I think that kind of misses where ARM and Microsoft are going with this - I think ARM wants to expand out of the mobile space and into the space VIA has been occupying all these years, that is to say low-powered but cheap desktops and laptops. There's evidence to suggest (admittedly the testing methodology has some pretty nasty holes in it) that Nvidia's Tegra 2 250, which is a 1GHz, dual core ARM A9 based CPU has performance similar to the Intel Atom 270 (1.6GHz, hyperthreaded single core) in what I believe is a single-threaded benchmark. All things considered, that's not bad, given that ARM A15 parts supposedly will come in flavours of anything up to quad-cores running at 2.5GHz.

More to the point, if Microsoft supported ARM right now, potentially ARM CPUs could be used in applications such as nettops and low-power laptops in the mainstream with similar performance to an Intel Atom. In the future, I think they're more likely to be competitive with low-end desktop CPUs.
 
Quads at some point, only dualcore chips for phones were actually confirmed for this year with quads a very big if. Still, the dual cores have ps3 level graphics (not bad for a phone :)) and ms development cycle is long. It's quite possible they could miss this gen and launch at the next.

Either way, arm have a stranglehold on mobile devices that intel can only dream of in pcs. Don't forget mobile devices drastically outnumber pcs/laptops. It's a ridiculously huge, untapped market.
 
One of the biggest advantages of ARM-based servers is that they can be reliably run in air conditioning-free environments. That lowers costs and increases flexibility.

For the big web-based firms, where they're executing many tiny tasks rather than a few huge tasks, ARM-based servers are definitely going to be the future.
 
Azuse05 said:
mobile devices drastically outnumber pcs/laptops
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That's because they go obsolete in mere minutes and people who want to keep up have to buy another - making the sales super high :P

That is why I havn't jumped onto the palm computing bandwagon yet, it is still increasing in performance too fast for me to make my own little investment. I only got a laptop for the first time this year because they wern't worth the effort until the 2010 hardware that doesn't overheat instantly. Yes it was possible to get non-fail-prone laptops before 2010 but they cost a lot more, for £550 I got myself a cool running laptop that games like a champ (bc2 ~50fps, me2 ~70fps etc no prob).

To explain my reasoning: If I had bought an iPhone I would be hitting myself right now, the mobile market is going to expand so much more in performance pretty soon.

only dualcore chips for phones were actually confirmed for this year... the dual cores have ps3 level graphics
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:eek:
 
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