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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.'"
You will kneel before Z80!
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.
NT was originally designed to be portable. Whether that has been retained since the abandonment of support for Alphas and PowerPCs is something I couldn't say. However, it wasn't an insurmountable effort to port other operating systems like Linux over to new infrastructures, so I doubt it would be that horrifying awful for Microsoft. In fact, I'd be damned surprised if Microsoft, like Apple before it, didn't have some resources quietly working on it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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)
Great! Let's just set the compile flag for NT 4.0 to "ARM" and.. waaaiiit a minute.
moox. for a new generation.
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?
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
Well, Microsoft can't just ignore the risk "if x86 goes down, we go down". For this reason some kind of even the lastest versions of windows portability is plausible, IMO.
Yes, so all the standard (rubbish) arguments people make about linux apply equally here.
Oh but I can't run $software_2_people_use! It's useless!
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.
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,
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.
Does it Freeze, lock up, blue screen, crash & reboot like a full windows OS too?
Where is this freezing, locking, BSODing, crashing, and rebooting Windows OS that you speak of? Aside from a few driver conflict issues, I haven't had many problems since Win2k (and XP). I have yet to have a Windows issue on Vista x64 and Windows 7, actually... although I still really didn't like Vista at all.
Disclaimer: No, I am not a Windows fanboy. Yes, I run Linux. I work with AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Windows, and Linux as my day job. I don't like Macs out of principle.
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.
XP was pretty good. After patching it a few times. Windows Vista Home 32 bit still crashes while trying to play Oblivion, and somehow manages to freeze up when playing Pre-Win2K games in "compatibility mode". Windows 7 on the other hand, I haven't had much opportunity to really fiddle around.
They do have a port for power architecture , its called the xbox360. :p
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Was it Linus who said that Microsoft hating was a disease? I am a Linux user at home. I'm not much of a fan for Windows XP and I loath the Vista user interface. Windows 7 actually has me a little excited. And all of these are stable systems. The benefit to Windows XP being around for so long is that Microsoft had a long time to make it stable. I haven't had a blue screen of death on Windows in years. It's time for people to move on from knocking Windows for instability. It just makes them look like lackeys.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Only five years ago...
Only five years ago, Twitter was still steam-powered!
Actually it's kind of true. And that's only part of the reason that this is a good idea (for Microsoft).
AFAIK (and I don't know much) - ARM chips don't require a translation layer that converts machine code to microcode - and this results in huge efficiency gains (compared to x86/x64 chips). If that's the case (second disclaimer - I don't know much about this so I could be wrong) - but if that's the case, the future of laptops/netbooks/mobile devices/perhaps even datacenters probably has ARM in it somewhere. After all, power efficiency is important in all these areas, and only getting more important with time.
So in other words, MS themselves might want to think about building ARM versions of Windows irrespective of any persuasion from ARM.
The reason Intel having MS by the balls comes into the picture -- Intel has been 'sleep around' a little over the last few years. For example Moblin. Or recall the Mac Book Air processor that debuted exclusively with Apple before an PC OEMs even knew it existed. So MS might want to keep Intel on their toes as well and let them know that they're not going to be the only game in town forever (with due apologies to AMD who are putting up a game fight).
I used Vista x64. No problems with Oblivion, one of th few games I do play. Maybe it was a hrdware or driver issue, I don't know. Hooray for two conflicting anecdotal evidences! ... hehe.
Windows 7 seems much smoother, so far, than Vista - even though I just said I didn't have too many issues with Vista, hehe. I've run some pretty old programs on it with no problems. If you do use Windows, I'd actually recommend it. Oblivion "has issues," according to MS - which I think is an alt-tab issue - but it handles it fine otherwise. It switches the desktop to 'classic' mode before running and switches it back afterwards. NWN2, Sid Meier's Pirates!, Sibelius (music notation software), Age of Empires III ... all working fine so far.
Only five years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of music and video on computers
Wait... I CLEARLY remember watching porn on my PC in the 90's... And that had crappy porno music.... So.... WELCOME TO THE 90's!
"Gratuitous complexity is akin to chaos" - True Vox
I haven't had a blue screen of death on Windows in years.
Then that means you're doing it wrong!
I'm just kidding, I only ever have them when I'm pushing the limits, IE, running something slightly below the Minimum Requirements.
(Damn you AutoCAD!)
Actually, the first BSOD I had in a number of years was when I installed Vista recently (fully SPed too). I quickly went back to XP until 7 RTM came out.
Yes, I will admit 7 has been quite smooth, apart from the odd lock up/crash when playing TF2. Still, there's your lock up.
Whether you're a fanboy or not, you seem to be ill informed about windows issues. They still exist and are still a thorn in Microsoft's side.
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;
I'm guessing the OP meant to say "on phones", not "on computers".
NT came in Alpha and MIPS once too, you can see how well that went.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
The benefit to Windows XP being around for so long is that Microsoft had a long time to make it stable.
Before that even - Windows 2000 is rock solid. The important point is that they're all derived from the much more stable NT line, as opposed to the shoddy Windows 9x that everyone remembers, and still seems to give Windows a bad name, even though it was a completely different OS (it would be like criticising OS X for the flaws in the joke that was classic MacOS).
We've never been at a point where we could run a full OS in a mobile profile.
What's your definition of "a full OS"? Presumably you're not counting iPhone OS, even though it's based on much of the same core OS code that Mac OS X is based on (heck, jailbreak it and you can even get a terminal emulator with a shell prompt). (I don't know whether the rumored Nokia N900 would be a phone or not, or whether it'll be Maemo-based.)
2004 era phones (RAZR, for example) supported music and video.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I bought a new laptop preloaded with Vista, which blue screened as soon as a USB mouse was plugged in.
You can imagine how impressed I was with my first Vista machine. This was with Vista SP2 out of the box a few months ago.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Only five years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of music and video on computers
I'm guessing the OP meant to say "on phones", not "on computers".
Even on phones, I doubt people would have been laughed at the idea five years ago. Remember that the Motorola Rokr (the iTunes compatible phone) was out almost four years ago, and it's not like playing MP3s on your phone seemed such a big deal even then.
Ten years ago, perhaps. It's almost exactly 10 years since Napster arrived, and most people at that time hadn't even heard of- let alone listened to- MP3s. The first style/youth-oriented phone, the Nokia 3210, had only just arrived as well, offering (*gasp*!) customisable ring tones- customisable monophonic beeps that is.
So, ten years ago, the embryonic parts of today's market had literally just arrived on the scene, though perhaps it wasn't obvious at the time. However, five years ago, I doubt that (given the ever-increasing power of electronics) MP3 and video on phones in the near future would have seemed that far fetched.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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?
It's pretty hard to blame the OS for a game lockup. In most cases it's the graphics driver getting woefully confused and eating it, resulting in a hard lock, or the game just wedging (if you could get the processor time to switch out you could kill the process, but often you can't--this happens in Linux gaming, what little there is of it, too).
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
(sigh). I miss my Commodore Amiga. So easy-to-use and once an MMU was nstalled, as stable as a rock.
>>>haven't had many problems since Win2k (and XP).
Me neither... on my desktop. The Pentium 4 PC has no problems with XP, but my AMD K6(?) laptop does bluescreen at least once a week. So Windows ain't perfect yet.
And as for Vista, ugh. Last time I turned-on my Vista machine, it claimed I had an invalid serial number. I copied it directly from the CD install disc - don't know why it's giving me hassles. (And of course even when it's working properly, that "Are you sure you want to watch video XYZ?" pop-up is damned annoying.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
XP is simply Windows 2000 with a new coat of paint, so that's why they are so similar. Also these are not just "derived" from NT - they are all still part of that line:
NT 3.1 (first release)
NT 3.5
NT 4.0
2000 = NT 5.0
XP == NT 5.1
Vista == NT 6.0
Windows7 = NT 6.1
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"Well, Microsoft can't just ignore the risk" Perhaps "risc" instead? Talk about laugh, I nearly did.
I'm in to sadism, bestiality and necrophilia. Am I flogging a dead horse?
He's still wrong - I'm pretty sure mp3 phones were around before 5 years ago, and it was also around 2004 that companies were hyping viewing video on then new 3G phones.
Now 11 years ago, that's when we laughed at the idea of video on compuers :)
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?
Most of windows is probably written in C/C++ or C# by now, so I'd say its pretty portable that way anyway. All the major APIs have been recently re-written recently, and moving to a new architecture would allow them to drop a lot of legacy x86 shit... I'd hazard a guess that Microsoft has Windows running on various other platforms in some way internally already. They'd be stupid not to.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I've stuck with Intel motherboards, intel CPUs and Nvidia video for the past 6 years, and the only blue screen i have seen in that time (on my desktop, don't get me started on the BIOS and driver issues on my P.O.S. Dell E6400 under Vista) was due to faulty RAM.
But again, blue screens on the E6400 are Dell's fault. As proven by them coming and going with various BIOS and driver updates.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The opcode decoder stage in a modern x64 processor is about 5% of the active (non-cache) transistors, it's not a significant contributor to power use. The biggest problem is that modern x54 designs are very complex and so they don't scale down as far as a stripped down ARM core can.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Sorry, but I *HAVE* had shitty drivers in Linux cause lockups when playing a graphically intense game. Hard-lock, wouldn't even panic. I've also seen kernel panics from drivers with nearly-correct hardware. Linux isn't immune from faulty drivers/hardware locking up the OS.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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".
Thanks for the insight! Do you know if that complexity translate into a higher IPC for x64 designs? We already have 32-bit ARM processors clocking in the 1GHz region. If they've got low IPCs compared to x64 processors it might explain some of the performance difference (i.e. that ARM is following a true RISC style approach).
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.
So, what you're telling me is that it does wedge the system for any normal user?
Awesome. Thanks for the corroboration.
Unless you're trolling to demonstrate how braindead-fucked-up the Linux-on-the-desktop people tend to be, in which case I applaud heartily.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
It is good opportunity to make another Apple-like machines, e.g. running really damn polished Ubuntu or something like that.
NT was originally designed to be portable. Whether that has been retained since the abandonment of support for Alphas and PowerPCs is something I couldn't say.
Given that it's still availabile on 3-4 (depending on how you want to count) different architectures, I'd say "yes, it has been retained" is a fairly safe bet.
The problem is not the OS. The problem is the applications.
What's your definition of "a full OS"?
An operating system whose user space comes jailbroken out of the box, like Linux or Mac OS X or Windows.
At equal levels of microcode-per-clock, the RISC machine needs to fetch quite a bit more instructions-per-clock out of cache/ram, which is actualy problematic when the instruction fetching unit runs at the same speed as the CPU. The instruction fetcher is highly parallel, which in turn means that the pipeline must also be highly parallel to accomodate, and so on..
Yes CISC machines have more complicated decoding logic, but its offset to a large extent by various RISC-punishing factors.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
How about "When you're in the software business, there is always a risc."
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.
Yeah, because I really keep another computer around just in case X wedges when I'm playing the (very few) games that exist on Linux.
Oh, wait. I don't, because my other machines (which do run Linux) are all headless and keyboardless.
You're a fucking retard.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Yes, x64 has a much higher IPC than a non-superscaler design like most ARM cpu's (the A8 and A9 are the only superscalar ARM cpu's). ARM also get lower MIPS/watt despite what people claim, the A9 MP gets only 2,000 Drystone MIPS while consuming .64W whereas Atom 330 get 7,800 DMIPS from 2W (3,125 MIPS/W vs 3,900). If you need to fit into a sub Watt power envelope then Intel currently doesn't have a solution for you but for anything from a palmtop on up you are better off with the Intel solution because it gets better performance per Watt, scales to much higher performance, and is compatible with the 99.99+% of software that's available for the dominant ISA.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
[quote]Aside from a few driver conflict issues, I haven't had many problems since Win2k (and XP).[/quote]
Aside from a few recurring issues that the average user would not have a clue how to fix, would probably just live with?
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.
I've been writing PC/console games for 10 years now, and these days if your system locks (at least while playing something like TF2, especially fullscreen) there's a 90% chance it's a driver issue, most likely video drivers.
I've been a mac user since 1984, run ubuntu on my netbook, and have refused to install any MS software on my macs (mostly as a test). I also have to run windows at work (xbox dev sort of requires it), and it almost never crashes. It hurts me to say it, but it's true.
There are still countless horrible design flaws all over windows, but frequent OS instability in the absence of buggy driver-level code is now rare.
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.
On a related note, I've had kernel panics while installing Arch Linux. Not a knock against Arch at all, I'm really interested in getting it on my machine but the fact is that bad/broken drivers will lock up any OS, and a BSOD is always a hardware issue by design. The only time I've seen a BSOD in the past 8 years or so was recently when I was undervolting my laptop to reduce the heat, but I expected it to happen anyway.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Clearly you've never had a driver wedge the kernel, you maggot-fucked brain-dead freetard. I have. It happens. And no, you can't just magically SSH into it when it panics because the graphics driver shits itself.
And WINE doesn't count for games when I have a perfectly good Windows machine right here. You can't help but fail, can you?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
The fact that NT has run on Risc architectures in the past an currently Windows on x86, x64, Itanium (and probably PPC for XBoxes) and Windows CE runs the GDI on ARM makes me think they could do it. The GDI code is probably quite portable, especially if it is shared between CE and the desktop.
Still they'd have to port Office. Office is x86 only but coming soon to x64. But that's not really the point - people run Windows because they have a bunch of CDs with x86 Win32 binaries on them. Those will run like ass on an x86 emulator running on ARM.
Even for native code I think that any shipping ARM is going to end up performing as fast or slower than an Atom. And desktop Windows, even XP or 7, is a bit slow on Atom for my tastes. Finally ARM is a cool chip with lots of clever addressing modes. Those clever addressing modes, if you believe Henessy and Patterson, have a cost in terms of maximum clock speed and building superscalar out of order chips, i.e. the sort of chips that get used even on notebooks these days. For a 500Mhz in order single chip in a cellphone that's no problem. For a 2+Ghz out of order dual issue chip, i.e. a Core2 class ARM I wonder if ARM is just a poor fit. Mind you you could get rid of the 32 bit instructions and run the MIPs like Thumb subset.
Still, I'm skeptical that ARM will end up replacing x64. Come to think of it that's another thing ARM doesn't do - 64 bit address spaces. Don't get me wrong - ARM is great if you want a small in order core in some embedded widget, but it's even less suited for the current desktop world than x64.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I think x64 will dominate desktops and servers, but for code density the Thumb2 instruction set on ARM should be pretty good.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
A quick Google for "Oblivion crash vista" gives things like this
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/trying-to-get-oblivion-to-work-on-vista#post-53749
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Again, in proprietard-land, sometimes, explorer freezes. When this happens, it's over.
1998 much?
You seem very angry. I guess being a perpetual virgin does that to you.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Office for mac is written in pretty portable code. It might take more than a week, but MS could throw a team at it for a month or two and probably have a working beta that would compile for ARM
moox. for a new generation.
I never said anything about sshing into a box that has a kernel lock.
Yeah, but I did. Read my first post: in most cases it's the graphics driver getting woefully confused and eating it, resulting in a hard lock. That's a kernel issue. I've been talking about a kernel issue the entire time, except where I bothered to laugh at you for your "well yeah but if X freezes" inanity (where you very well illustrated why I, despite having three headless Linux servers locally and running a number of VMs on Rackspace's cloud services, don't use Linux on my desktop, and how out-of-touch you are with how people actually use their computers). I'm friends with a guy who worked at nVidia on their Linux driver code; even pointed him at this thread. He agreed with me and did so in tones that suggested he found it incredible that you would even contest it.
You seem to be unable to stay on point, though. Ah well. It's okay. Really, Linux appreciates how vitriolic you get about it. Your behavior truly makes other people more interested in Linux. You're awesome.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
AMD logo on an ARM newsitem?
Slashdot is getting old ...
Office for Mac is really crappy though!
Mac office is designed to run on a different OS though. It's also apparently a different code base from the Windows version. I think the fact that Windows office is being ported to x64 means that Office is being made more portable now anyway. Really there's not much of an excuse for modern Win32 application not being portable to other processors, the problem is that Office has been around for ages and probably has a few x86isms like inline assembly back when that was necessary for performance. Or something like that. Anyhow Office 2010 will have both 32 and 64 bit binaries -
http://www.redmondpie.com/office-2010-x64-technical-preview-screenshots/
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Of course that only works if your computer is on a network, you have access to another computer on that network, and ssh access from that other computer to the frozen-X one is enabled.
And BTW, before doing the kill -9, it's a good idea to first try kill -15 (note: -15 is the default for the kill command), kill -2 and kill -1. Unlike kill -9, those give the misbehaving application a chance to clean up. Most applications still react to a regular kill, and an astonishing number of those who don't react on -15 do so on -2 or -1. It's a very rare case that you have to resort to the "nuclear option" -9.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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!
Old versions of office (97 i believe) were ported to Alpha back in the days.
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
This was a fairly expensive Toshiba and Vista's default drivers... it was a fucking Microsoft mouse.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
All current ARM processors are 32-bit. There is nothing imminent on the roadmap for a 64-bit ARM processor.
You can kill an X11 application too, using xkill, or terminal and a top...
Both of these examples assume the GUI is functional, which it might not be (some programs, eg vmware, can hijack all input, and if such a program crashes you often find yourself unable to interact with the gui even if technically it hasn't crashed)...
On Linux the gui is not an inherent part of the system, and the entire gui system (X11) can be killed and restarted... Explorer is not the equivalent of X11, it's not even the equivalent of a window manager, it's closer to nautilus.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Good luck with that. Never gonna happen.
The point I was pointing out, and that you missed (as you apparently aren't intellectually equipped to appreciate this) is that just because Microsoft pays shills doesn't mean that a given person with a positive opinion of a Microsoft product is necessarily a Microsoft shill.
And the reality is that it doesn't matter. In one case, the person is conveying their opinion, which can be simply countered with yours, and really doesn't matter in any debate (an opinion isn't proof of anything). In the other case, they're conveying facts, which can be verified or discounted. Claiming that a person is a shill is an anti-intellectual appeal to emotion. Its intellectual dishonesty, unless you have any proof to back up the claim (which they never do). In case you missed it with your staggering intellect, proof here means proof that the person in question is a shill, not proof that Microsoft in general pays for shills.
But then again, you're linking to boycottnovel and twitter's journal, so you know all about intellectual dishonesty (Hell I'm giving it a 50/50 that you are twitter. Hi twitter!) But go ahead, have fun labeling me a troll. Easier to dodge the point that way, isn't it?
Oh but I can't run $software_2_people_use! It's useless!
That's not insightful, that's a troll.
Can I keep knocking them for their lousy documentation, unsupported libraries, Dilbert-driven technical decisions, and unethical conduct? I used to never knock Microsoft when I was a Java developer. Now that I'm a native coder, I understand.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well that's good news. I use 97 at work and it seems to work flawlessly (and damn fast on a modern computer, at that)
moox. for a new generation.
How so, anonymous coward?
It nearly always comes up here and elsewhere - Linux can't run application X, therefore it is useless. Windows on ARM would suffer from exactly the same.
Yes
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
+5 Insightful, sir!
Ctrl-Alt-Delete is handled below the explorer.exe level, and so still responds even if explorer.exe does not, but my point was that explorer hanging, as the angry little AC insisted, did not mean you had to reboot.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
The funniest bit about this whole thing is that my business's products run on LAMP, because it's the best environment for it. I use Windows on the desktop because it works best for me. I don't call it the best one out there (as far as I'm concerned, OS X has that, I just don't feel like paying for a Mac), but all my business applications run on open-source.
You're a very angry person.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Excuse me, I'm just a teenaged enthusiast, but isn't recompilation all that is needed to get some application from the type of an office suite running on another CPU?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
This is a bit confusing, but ARM claims 250 mW. That may be for a 2000 DMIPS single core, or it might be for an 8000 DMIPS quad core. Either way, that's 1 W at most for a quad, or half of Atom's power consumption.
If you're counting the SoC power, then please count the Atom's north and southbridges.
Oh, and I just noticed, you used an Atom 330. That's not a 2 watt CPU, that's 8 watts. If Intel made a low voltage (N-series) part, it'd be 5 W, and a ULV (Z-series) part would be 4 W.
That has two CPUs, one x86 and one ARM, and Windows runs on the x86.
This is about running Windows on an ARM.
But ARM knows that consumers want Windows, not Linux. Hence all this.
Yes, applications are the problem, but if ARM sticks with it, eventually apps will migrate. I'll note that the various ports of NT to other architectures (other than MIPS) weren't paid for by Microsoft.
DEC paid MS to do the Alpha port (which is why Windows 2000 wasn't released for Alpha - Compaq decided to chase Itanium, and stopped paying Microsoft to develop the Alpha port,) and I'm fairly sure someone in the AIM alliance paid MS to do the PowerPC port, and fairly sure HP/Intel paid MS to do the Itanium port.
So, ARM would just have to pay MS to keep the port maintained. Keep doing it, and my guess is, given proper developer support (for example, Visual Studio compiling both x86 and ARM binaries by default,) within two Windows version generations, you'll have decent application support for ARM.
You're playing a game on your ARM-based netbook away from home - remember, that's what we're talking about here. Not sure what you're playing, Tux Racer, maybe, because that's about all it could handle that runs on Linux. Oh, wait, maybe LBreakout. Anyway, something crashes and you need to SSH into it. Wait, you're on your netbook that you suggested someone buy for the purpose of SSHing into other computers. And you can't set up an ad hoc connection between your cell phone and your netbook because you'd have to SSH in to do that, and last I checked, phones didn't have ethernet or (lately, anyway - yes, I know, Palm OS stuff has them, but you're a Linux beardo that probably has a Freerunner, forget a G1 or a Pre) RS232 ports.
But this is purely a hypothetical that you wouldn't understand, because you'd have to actually venture out of your mom's basement to encounter such a situation.
In an idea world, yes. I've written code and it builds fine for a couple of platforms. I've also worked with code that took ages to port - third party libraries needed to be replaced, inline assembler rewritten and loads of alignment, structure packing and timing issues needed to be fixed. And architecturally it's quite easy to end up with code that depends on some subtle detail which you only find out about once you port.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
IOW, LLVM FTW.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.