Slashdot Mirror
ARM Hopes To Lure Microsoft Away From Intel
Steve Kerrison writes "With the explosion of netbooks now available, the line between PC and mobile phone is becoming much less distinct. ARM, one of the biggest companies behind CPU architectures for mobile phones (and other embedded systems), sees now as an opportunity to break out of mobiles and give Intel a run for its money. HEXUS.channel quizzes Bob Morris, ARM's director of mobile computing, on how it plans to achieve such a herculean task. Right now, ARM's pushing Android as the OS that's synonymous with the mobile Internet. But it's not simply going to ignore Microsoft: 'What if Microsoft offered a full version of Windows (as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows CE) that used the ARM, rather than X86 (Intel and AMD) instruction set? Then it would be a straight hardware fight with Intel, in which ARM hopes its low power, low price processors will have an advantage.'"
ladies, get your pussies ready!
You will kneel before Z80!
Intel has Microsoft by the balls. [maybe not, but i just wanted to say that]
Does it Freeze, lock up, blue screen, crash & reboot like a full windows OS too?
Or more importantly... Can it run Linux?
Employing strongARM tactics? Better keep them at ARM's length. (Don't worry, these horrible puns are quite ARMless.)
Given a Microsoft OS, these processors could easily pierce the market as many people would not even notice the difference between an Intel netbook or an ARM netbook. This seems like the best way to enter the market.
But it wouldn't be a straight fight between ARM and Intel. It would be a fight between ARM, StrongARM, Asynchronous ARM (yes, there really is an asynchronous CPU based on the ARM core), and every other ARM variant out there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Mac users have had to endure 2 processor family changes and finally had to settle for the same one the PC uses. Could you imagine the irony if the PC switched to ARM and the Mac was left using the "outdated" x86 architecture?
We've never been at a point where we could run a full OS in a mobile profile. Yet this could be the bridge we cross over to reach such an awesome concept.
Only five years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of music and video on computers, but today we can use the power of the Internet to access this content with our televisions and stereo systems. It really makes you wonder, if with the decreasing cost and increasing capacity of Compact Flash (CF) technology, not to mention built-in WiFi, we're reaching the level of convergence where it is possible to run the same operating system everywhere.
We can send e-mail with a cellphone, or place phone calls from a computer. Why not play DVDs on a handheld, or browse the Internet with your television? The future is now.
Will I be able to download and run J Random Application and have it execute on my ARM PC? .net might be heading that way, but there is still a hell of a lot of native x86 apps out there.
If the answer is no, then it is simply not going to fly.
Windows on ARM would be as pointless as every other port Microsoft has tried and eventually killed off. And for the same reason, lack of applications.
Microsoft itself has never bothered porting any of their consumer apps such as Office. Remember DEC having to use FX!32 to get Office running via emulation at a fraction of native speed... leading customers to fail to see the advantage of the Alpha. Now we are to expect the hundreds of large and small shops making the Windows apps people associate with "Windows" to all port to a platform where there are no suitable developer workstations available and Windows development tools lack much in the way of cross compiler support.
Compare to Linux on ARM where pretty much the entire Debian/Ubuntu collection is up and running and Adobe has ported the one key closed piece, Flash Player.
Democrat delenda est
Do you remember the last time they tried to introduce a new Windows platform on a non-Intel based architecture?
Yes, it was Windows CE.
The biggest stumbling block was that MS made it look to much like Windows and gave it a confusing name. Users who bought in wondered why none of their favorite apps would work.
If MS went with an ARM architecture, the biggest issue would be everything else. All your apps would have to be specifically compiled to run on one architecture or the other. (Didn't Apple have this problem, and come up with FAT Bits and then carbon?) How many sales would be lost because WoW or game of the day doesn't run on that yet?
Or ARM would have to implement an X86 compatibility layer.
Hmmm. Windows 8 Ultimate Extreme Business Gamer ARM Edition Pro. Sounds like a winning SKU to me.
But will in run on a Mac or in VMWare?
If Windows runs on ARM, you still have to convince hardware manufacturers to make drivers for your platform. And don't forget you also need to get software houses to compile for your platform as well. good luck with that.
Don't even bother trying to make a deal with the devil. The rotting corpses of the scores of companies screwed over through their dealings with Microsoft line the landscape of the past decades tech industry. Instead, make them come to you and don't make any deals with them either. If ARM based netbooks start becoming a huge commodity, Microsoft is going to have to port a version of Windows to run on ARM processors or they'll end up missing out on sales.
It would probably make a great deal of sense for Microsoft to work on this as well as it would most certainly help out their ailing phone technologies as well. They'd probably rather that ARM-based netbooks not take off in the market, but if they were to do so, Microsoft wouldn't be able to ignore them. I wouldn't bother making any plans with them at this point; they'd only find some way to fuck you over.
Intel and Microsoft do have the same interests and earn a lot of money because of their relationship. What has ARM to offer against that? Mobile phones? Who wants Windows on his phone anyway? Or Linux? Nokia with Symbian still do have lead there simply because they deliver what the customer wants.
why wait for vaporware when you got already available today linux on systems like, android, moblin, ubuntu remix, maemo etc? not to mention the future googleOS, which is based...right...linux!
ARM can't run x86 software, so would be nothing other than a GUI and name recognition, due to the lack of app support. Same issue Windows NT on MIPS and PowerPC had back in the day.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The article is nothing but FUD. They base the relationship of Microsoft and Intel cooling on a comment an Intel employee made at a trade show that some Microsoft employees in the next booth overheard and said "Hey, we're listening."
This is just another crappy article that is spread over a bazillion pages when one when would do so they can push their advertisers.
"What if Microsoft switched to ARM?"
"What if Count Chocula and the Cookie Monster teamed up kidnapped the Keibler Elves? What if monkey's flew out of Cowboy Neil's butt? What is Megan Fox showed up naked at my front door with Natalie Portman covered in grits?"
Its about the same comparison.
I honestly hope this works, ARM always seems to use a more stable and generally applicable architecture, besides, at this point it the game we can get speed and cores and performance no problem, but in the long run it will always boil down to performance/watt. This might apply more to servers, but I think it is still a good idea for all tiers of computing. Might finally get people to accept a reasonable standard so we can stop splitting the compiler developer community. *pieinthesky*
Which means that an ARM market gets into the same chicken/egg problem that a shift to Linux does.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
nt;
Microsoft was once king on the Intel platform and then came Linux which was much less expensive, followed by Mac OS X which was more user friendly.
So that would mean they would have to fight 2 fronts to survive and try to keep their supremacy.
Now, with notebooks being the new eldorado, Microsoft could benefit a lot more if they try to gain momentum on ARM which Apple cannot afford to follow (yet) because of another big CPU switch.
Wherever there are ARM, the CORE will come to destroy. Long live CORE!
The problem isn't the OS, it's the software for the OS. On Linux, you port the kernel, and then simply rebuild your distro (fixing portability bugs in the process relatively rarely). Job done. On Windows, you need mom & pop go to the car boot sale, buy Knitting Extravaganza 4.0, and still have it install/run successfully.
I think this is the whole reason why microsoft is pushing dot-net and higher-level languages -- not because they care about the languages so much, but because they care about abstracting the windows platform away from PCs until a virtual machine, like Java has been doing for years. Whether Windows, OS X, Linux, or something else wins the desktop wars, Java will survive. Microsoft wants to survive that loss too.
Someone here is ignoring one of the biggest draw of Windows. People can run *their programs* on Windows. They wont be able to do that with Windows on ARM. Then they might as well be running Chrome OS or some other variant of Linux. At least with most variants of Linux they'll have huge selection of software that runs on ARM.
When Apple switched from Motorola 680x0 to PowerPC processors in 1994, they built an emulator into the operating system to allow m68k code to run transparently on the new platform. In fact, they didn't even port the entire operating system itself; bits and pieces of it ran under emulation for years as Apple gradually finished porting it all.
In addition, they created an easy way for applications to be compiled natively for BOTH architectures at the same time, and encouraged application developers to release fat binary versions of their apps. This worked so well that the majority of users weren't even aware that the PowerPC was a completely new incompatible architecture, as opposed to simply a new faster version of what they'd always had.
When Apple switched CPU architectures again, they mostly duplicated this success. Some applications and drivers aren't compatible with Rosetta (the PowerPC emulator), and it's not possible to use a plugin compiled for one processor in an application compiled for another, but Apple's own developer tools offered a simple checkbox to recompile an app as a Universal Binary, and most developers have moved away from third-party compilers.
Microsoft does have x86 emulation technology that they bought from Connectix a few years ago, but they have no experience getting applications to work transparently across dissimilar architectures, and moving from a faster Intel CPU to a slower ARM CPU makes emulation pretty unappealing anyway. Look at what a pain in the ass it is just to get everything to work on a 64-bit version of Windows!
Mac developers are accustomed to following Apple's spontaneous whims, because users consistently reward them with big piles of cash, but Windows developers have a lot less incentive to play ball by releasing native applications for a platform that doesn't exist yet, has no users, and seems unlikely to get users because there is no native software. If they can make the emulation work perfectly, then they might get some users, and if they have users, some developers will start porting their apps. You'll never get all of them, of course, but the ones most people use every day will probably have ARM-native versions introduced. Also, pure .Net applications should work perfectly out-of-the-box. Microsoft wouldn't use a universal binary architecture like Mac OS X; since virtually all Windows applications require an installer and you can't easily move an app from one computer to another without reinstalling it from scratch, there's no reason to do that.
In contrast, Apple could announce a new ARM-based Mac netbook tomorrow, and a majority of developers would have native applications ready to go in six months.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
There is a HTC Shift, a 7" mobile running Vista Business, 800MHz CPU, 1GB RAM and GMA 900.
NT came in Alpha and MIPS once too, you can see how well that went.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
If M$ can shove Vista down consumers throats (admittedly their success rate has been low), why can't folks imagine something just as preposterous on the hardware front?
When the first decent mass produced netbook -running ARM- hits the status of "blisterpack computer hanging near the checkout @ $99.95".. right next to the prepaid cellphones..I think the sales will be a lot better than "nothing other" and there will be browsers and media players and chat clients and wifi and so on, on it. Who knows, I could see a combo package, the netbook AND a cellphone in the same blisterpack.
And people will not care if it isn't microsoft, or x86, just like they don't care much today with cheaper phones. If it does some basic expected things, that's all it needs. They will sell millions of those machines. Browse, watch vids or listen to tunes, do some email, do some messaging...they'll sell. Nailing that C note is a huge marketing psychological advantage, first company there with something that doesn't suck and is "good enough" will get "*rich*. At 3-5 hundred bucks like they are today, nope, just little laptops with no DVD drive, they sell good enough, but... when netbooks crack $100...license to print money almost. More apps and developer interest will follow shortly.
This whole concept is nauseating. Others have explained why above -- no software, the only reason to do it is to emulate the UI, and we can do that with Linux, and why would we?
(That's what makes me gag.)
Okay, the other reason is marketing, to go with the crowd, to be "in" because Bill Gates is "in".
(And that also makes me gag.)
Sure, it's my opinion, but why mod me down for saying so in a crude way?
it'll suffer the same problem as the PPC version of Windows did, no applications.
All versions of Windows NT for x86 have a compatibility environment for running DOS apps and Windows 3.1 apps. All versions of Windows NT for x86-64 have a compatibility environment for running Win32 apps. Why can't Windows NT for ARM have a compatibility environment for running Windows CE apps?
When people read the specs and it says "Windows 7", they will expect to run Windows apps on it.
Not if it says "Windows Mobile 7".
Apple already ships a huge number of OS X machines with ARM chips, they just brand them as iPhones and iPod Touches. OS X makes it easy to add another architecture for fat binaries
Currently, if I compile an app as a fat binary for x86 and ARM, it won't actually run on a computer with an ARM CPU unless I pay Apple $99 to join the iPhone Creators Club. If Apple were to introduce "Mac" brand computers with ARM CPUs, how would the "fat binary" system handle different code signing requirements per instruction set?
Anyone expecting games (not counting little cellphone suitable stuff) to EVER be released as managed code will grow old and die waiting.
Games on .NET? Let me Bing that for you.
It is good opportunity to make another Apple-like machines, e.g. running really damn polished Ubuntu or something like that.
The JVM concept works. Right now I develop on an Intel/Linux[1] desktop and deploy the exact same jar files to an ARM system and a PowerPC system. Saves me a HUGE amount of effort. The user interface is via the web, so it all looks the same no matter where it runs. Luckily the JIT compilers make things fast enough so the app can be a pure java app, no dll/so required.
[1] The rest of the developers use Intel/Windows. Makes very little difference
for what we do except for video rendering.
Then Microsoft will be happy to follow suit!
Seriously though, an Apple "netbook" tablet style PC with a reasonable size screen (10" maybe?) with gestureriffic stuff and some nice note taking software would be awesome. I'd probably even preorder one... and I've never owned an Apple PC before. :-)
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much.
And once it's done, you've a way to run apps typically designed for a cell phone screen, with cell-phone buttons, on what is essentially a small laptop.
Every Windows Mobile device I've used has been a Pocket PC with a touch screen. And there even used to be Windows CE subnotebooks.
This would be a great time for Microsoft to get rid of 1001 compatibility fixes for applications that still rely on misfeatures DOS for x86 and will never be recompiled for ARM anyway. Maybe Windows will be able to become stable and secure in this iteration.
There is no evidence that MS is interested in porting Windows to ARM, the only thing anyone from ARM has said is that they would like WIndows to be available from ARM. They have not said that they will make any particular effort to get it ported.. This is all pure speculation.
Is that a regular ton + the weight of the approximate animal that shit that much for a whole year?
So, the average 180lb man would excrete 1 shit ton or equivalent of 2 English pounds of solid waiste for 365 days to meet the expectancy of his shit ton?
I know a full-size mare would reach a man's shit ton every 2 months easily, so that would make a man about 1/6 mare shit ton, and if a man were to sire a creature to be half-horse then that offspring would be 1/3 mare shit ton.
I know I kinda eluded onto a metric that might differentiate from yours, so I'll wait for your enlightenment O-ring King.
It doesn't matter if MS creates a full Windows OS for ARM, x86 has a different instruction set. Existing Windows software still wont work on it. For backwards compatability, a newer Windows version that either emulates, or requires applications have two sets of instructions would be a nightmare for developers and probably support in general. Imagine the transition from one windows OS to the next, multiplied by 100 times as much pain.
Because of Linux, a soup'd-up ARM processor already has a full OS. There's no lack of one.
There's also no mention of AMD in the article...? The (stronger) ARM would be competing with two companies, with a product that isn't directly compatible. No way they'll coexist, and Windows isn't going to ditch Intel for ARM, like Mac ditched Motorola for Intel.
AMD logo on an ARM newsitem?
Slashdot is getting old ...
Assuming windows was ported to arm, what about applications?
In the linux world, most apps come with sourcecode and are relatively easy to recompile for arm, you can use an existing distribution like debian which has thousands of applications already compiled for the arm processor, or if you are making such hardware it's not a huge effort to compile appropriate applications yourself.
Most linux applications are coded fairly cleanly, those badly written ones which don't are likely to have been fixed already since linux runs on so many different platforms.
On windows however, most apps come without sourcecode, and only come with binaries for x86, the vast majority of apps don't even come with x86-64 versions.
Only the original app vendor has the capability to port the application to arm, which brings up lots of problems...
Most windows app vendors are for-profit companies, they won't port to an architecture which doesn't have an existing user base. (conversely, a user base wont bulid around an architecture which has no apps)
It's impossible to tell how portable their code is, for some it may be possible to just recompile, but my experience of commercial development is that the build environment is often quite fragile and would need quite a lot of work to target a new platform.
Many people continue to run apps that aren't supported anymore by their original vendors, so no chance of porting.
The only thing windows really has going for it, is the existing base of applications... if you port it to arm, you take all that away so you end up with an immature expensive os with very few applications and very few users which compares very poorly to linux/arm.
the only thing that would help it sell is the windows name, but it would earn itself a very bad reputation when the customers realized they had effectively been tricked.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I've looked at BeagleBoard and some other TI OMAP3 board specs. They all have PowerVR video/3D accelerator, which does not have any open-source drivers. And I'm not even sure about closed source ones. These boards lose 90% of their cool without them.
Reading these specs felt like kissing a girlfriend and then getting kicked in the groin... Especially at a time when it is becoming possible to have a 100% open-source supported hardware in desktop machines (ATI drivers started supporting new cards, lots of opensource wifi drivers are mature, etc).
--Coder
All current ARM processors are 32-bit. There is nothing imminent on the roadmap for a 64-bit ARM processor.
Good luck with that. Never gonna happen.
Amalgamated Regional Militia?
(Its from the Known Space universe)
This article says Linux netbook return rates were high. We keep seeing this. But that doesn't square with what the CEO of Asus reports:
http://ostatic.com/blog/asus-ceo-says-linux-netbook-returns-on-par-with-windows
"He says ASUS has found the return rates for the Linux and Windows models are similar. He also said that Linux has been quite popular in the European market."