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Taiwanese OEMs Consider ARM Products For Windows 8
siliconbits writes "At CeBIT 2011, we went around the stands from some of the biggest component manufacturers in the world and asked them a simple question, would you consider bringing out ARM products (barebones, laptops, tablets, motherboards) for Windows 8? The answer was a unanimous yes; like Microsoft, the same firms that have been faithful Intel and AMD partners for years are prepared to explore other territories as soon as Windows 8 will go live."
What did you expect them to say - "No, we won't - we'll cede that market to our competitors, because our customers prefer products with crappy battery life"?
OK, finally we are moving away from x86 and toward RISC. We are only 20 years behind schedule, but hey, better late than never.
Palm trees and 8
I'd actually prefer they didn't. Joke as you will, it's an excellent opportunity for Linux to make inroads to the more casual user. The last one (netbooks) didn't get much time before Microsoft jumped in with XP netbooks.
How are they going to explain to the million of Windows users that no application they know will work on ARM Windows? It's the same as with Windows 64 bit and why we didn't saw much of it despite the prices for RAM are very low. I guess with Windows 7 the developers finally released some software for 64 bit. That's what, like 9 to 10 years since AMD came with the amd64 architecture?
Well, at least I can then finally buy some ARM notebooks and put a decent Linux distribution on it.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Stupid question.
Of course any system builder will tell you they'd "consider" ARM for Windows 8. They'd also "consider" building 9.6GHz 8088 systems running MS-DOS powered by the blood of virgins if that's where it looked like the market might go.
Log in or piss off.
Windows for ARM is going to be a humongous dud. The whole point of using Windows is backwards compatibility. Microsoft would have to use dynamic translation techniques similar to those used by Apple in the move from 68k to PowerPC to x86/x64, but ARM cores aren't faster than the Intel chips they're replacing and any power consumption advantage that ARM may have would be more than eliminated.
On the plus side, if manufacturers actually fall for it (as opposed to just using it as a bluff to put pressure on Intel), then we'll see more devices on which we can put Linux. I love my ARM based servers.
I just hope it won't be as bad as the current netbooks with Windows 7 Starter.
Had to deal with those as part of a software quality assurance project and if I never have to deal with crap like that again it'll be still too soon.
Windows won't have an interface meant for i.e. tablets till late next year. If they want an OS for a full range of devices they should go in a way or another Linux, be Android, WebOS, MeeGo, or even normal distributions like Ubuntu with the right desktop environment. Even Maemo would be a better alternative if hadnt so much closed components. Not sure which other alternatives are around, iOS? Playbook's OS? Apple/RIM won't license to others their OSs, they want to sell the devices and keep the ecosystem for themselves.
THe whole article simply doesn't make sense.
Manufacturers manufacture hardware, it's up to users to decide what OS it will be on(or decline sales figures if such choice is not there). M$ made decision to have their future OS's to be compatible with ARM. Now what? Manufacturers will be on purpose create devices that are not Windows compatible?
Quality, as per flame wars in here - has nothing to do with OS being supported or not by hardware vendors.
What's aim of this article? What's reasoning to begin with? Right, ARM is next hot cake, and Microsoft have no presence whatsoever on this platform. Therefore it must fall back to PR companies which tries to push articles like "Waiting for Windows 8", "ARM will be supported in Windows 8", "Hey, did you know Windows 8 is next best thing?" on portals like Slashdot.
Of course manufacturers will try to support any major operational system in the market - that includes Windows - if suddenly full blown Windows on ARM becomes reality. So this is worth separate article on Slashdot?
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
MS needed to have wakened up some 10 years ago.
Do they have a Windows version running on HW other than x86? Apart from XBOX 360, of course not
They used to have, but they believed their own crap about Wintel blah blah blah
Granted, they did a version for Itanic
But MS are the ones who where ultra-sluggish with AMD64
Apple had something like 3 versions of OS X on x86 before switching to Intel
And then people will buy and complain their 5 year old program doesn't work anymore.
how long until
OK, finally we are moving away from x86 and toward RISC. We are only 20 years behind schedule, but hey, better late than never.
MS Windows NT 4 supported RISC 15 years ago in 1996(*), Dec Alpha, IBM/Motorola PowerPC and MIPS. All on the standard Win NT 4 retail CD. Consumer oriented PowerPC machines were available. I recall Byte magazine comparing dual PowerPC and dual x86 systems. Alpha machines were available for the more serious users. Despite better computational performance on the RISC based machines x86 won due to price and software availability. ARM could fail as well. ARM may have better battery performance but is it so much better that it will outweigh the software availability issue?
Also as other have pointed out the x86 has a RISC core. x86 instructions are converted to RISC instruction on-the-fly, scheduled and executed. The "problem" is that we do not have direct access to this core and must go through the x86 facade.
(*) OK you can argue 1993, day 1 for Win NT, since MIPS was supported. However I don't think there was any real push towards a consumer MIPS machine. The motivation was more internal, making sure Win NT was portable to other architectures.
MS has in the past had its problems with delivering on time and companies have gotten burned if they planned a release of a product to need a unreleased MS product while MS was dragging its feet. Early Win95 games come to mind. There was a reason Quake was a DOS game. Blue Isle took a hit on making their next Battle Isle game require Win95.
I would be very hesistant to plan hardware yet on a completely unproven platform from a company that has never ever cared a tiny bit about its customers. See MS and the long long delay with 64 bit support until Intel and Dell were ready basically screwing AMD out of its lead advantage.
Just be careful taiwan, you don't want to end up with a stack of hardware getting outdated while MS delays the release month after month.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
he issue that you've got is that a) microsoft is not going to have windows for ARM until 2013, and even then it is impossible to get third party developers to do total rewrites of drivers b) emulation of x86, even with hardware assistance (similar to jazelle) only provides something like 30% equivalent performance. so you have a great processor, maybe 2ghz dual-core if you get the one from nufront, you smash its capabilities down to a staggering and mundane 700mhz, and you can only get up to about 1.5 gb of RAM because you need at least some memory for the Host OS.
now, yes you could instead use the ICT's "Godson" upcoming GS464V Quad-Core MIPS processor, which will have over 200+ hardware-accelerated assistance emulation instructions, but this CPU is designed to target the Chinese Government's desire to have the fastest supercomputer in the world - it would just also so happen to make a great Desktop / Server product, too, and the target power consumption is just a tad higher than any ARM processor.
overall, then, this is, very unfortunately, just pure wishful thinking on the part of every single taiwanese manufacturer. it's quite simple: to emulate another OS, the performance hit is so high that to compensate you might as well stick with the x86 processors, even if the higher performance ARM or MIPS processors were available they are actually significantly more expensive.
so instead, why not accept the fact that much much cheaper systems can be made, based around such low-power high-integrated embedded ARM and MIPS processors, and let the buyers decide?
http://lkcl.net/laptop.html
Dont forget the embedded devices running windows too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If this is a ARM story, why is the logo set to AMDs? they haven't bought them out yet have they?
Unless MS is playing their classic "attempt to scuttle competitor's existing product with reports of what they will have Real Soon Now(tm)" game, or isn't going about this very cleverly(either is definitely possible); I would expect any push into non-x86 architecture to make heavy use of their .NET CLR stuff.
.NET components, that won't be the end of the world)...
Virtualizing any classic win32 x86 binaries on ARM is going to suck so much, in terms of performance, that they might as well not bother. By the time Windows 8 actually makes it out the door, Intel will have something that may not beat ARM in the low-power game; but will curb-stomp ARM-emulating-x86. However, if Microsoft has an ARM CLR up and going, all the outfits that have been drinking the kool-aid for the past few years should need to do little more than drop their x86 installer packages in order to be fully compatible(and even if some x86 installshield package needs to be emulated long enough for it to copy over the
(*) OK you can argue 1993, day 1 for Win NT, since MIPS was supported. However I don't think there was any real push towards a consumer MIPS machine. The motivation was more internal, making sure Win NT was portable to other architectures.
On the contrary, there was a major push by the ACE consortium to replace the x86 PC with a common platform built around MIPS and Windows NT. Unfortunately, it was mostly industry hype with very little product appearing in the retail channel before the whole thing was discarded.
I don't think desktop machines will move, or at least not move easily. However, unlike 1993, desktop machines aren't quite the PC universe anymore. On the top, we have legions of rack mounted servers. Coming up from the bottom are smart phones and tablets. Neither of these segments is as tightly wedded to Windows as the desktop. Tablets today already run ARM and don't run Windows. For Microsoft, this must be very disturbing.
With servers, the move hasn't happened yet but data centers are seriously looking at ARM. Microsoft is trying to make sure their OS and application don't get dumped along with the power hunger x86 servers they run on.
i did hear that ARM has a jazelle-like acceleration for CLR. it is not well-understood, and, crucially as you point out, there isn't much call for it because you can't run silverlight on a non-existent OS! :)
One difference between Windows NT 4 and Windows 8 is that the latter has the .NET Framework. Once Microsoft ports the CLR and the UI toolkit, all fully managed applications are automatically ported. This includes any Silverlight application and any XNA game.
Another difference is that since the NT 4 days, home Internet access has become ubiquitous, mobile Internet access has become practical even if at a luxury price, efficient techniques for interpreting dynamic languages such as JavaScript have become known, and even APIs to let a web application run with an intermittent connection have been introduced. Web applications have begun to take advantage of these.
I see the article is tagged 'amd' and also carries the AMD logo. Please fix this.
It is about control of the OEMs.
Microsoft OEMs live or die via the 'loyalty discounts' given to them by MS. As long as the OEM only installs Windows on a particular model of a computer then the OEM will receive discounts and promotional incentives. If they do not then they will lose _all_ discounts over all products and this will cost millions of dollars.
With Netbooks the OEMs thought that Vista could not run on them so their business was safe with Linux. But MS reintroduced XP that could run on these and the OEM had to use it or lose discounts on all the desktop systems.
With ARM tablets, desktops and other, Windows 8 will run (granted there will be few applications for it) and so the OEM will have to install this or lose his x86 computer discounts.
Essentially this will kill this part of the business. You may be able to buy an ARM tablet from the OEM, but it will have a useless Windows 8 installed and the price will include the Microsoft tax. You could put Linux on it and MS won't care, they still have your money.
> never ever cared a tiny bit about its customers
Microsoft's customers are the OEMS: Dell, HP, Lenove, etc and retailers.
You may a customer of one of the OEM.
Windows makes ARM compatible version, hardware vendors plan on building hardware that will run it. What is the story? Unless ARM gets much more powerful fast, it would likely not make a great desktop or even laptop solution (similar to netbooks), but for certain niche places it would work well. It would probably make a nice file server, but these lower power applications are exactly the places I'd rather run linux.
is Office 100% .NET?
No, but that's not a deal killer. Microsoft Office or any other Microsoft application can and most likely will be recompiled for ARM, though the recompiled version won't work with third-party add-ons written in native code.
MS Live Messenger?
As far as I know, Windows Live Messenger has already been recompiled for both ARM (Windows Phone 7) and PowerPC (Xbox 360).
And since when do Taiwanese OEMs have the slightest clue about anything besides cost-cutting ? Yeah, duh, they'll jump on ARM because it'll be loads cheaper than Intel/AMD/Via, so instead of charging a 5x premium to box it and ship it overseas, they will charge a 10x premium.
That's like asking: if you could bottle tap water and sell it to cretinous americans for $3.00 a litre, would you ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
...that running Windows 8 won't cost and ARM and a leg....
What I find curious is that releasing ARM-based hardware is somehow tied to Windows 8 supporting it. What happened to the ARM-based netbooks we have been hearing about? Linux supports ARM just fine, and a lot of netbooks are sold with Linux anyway, so why aren't we seeing more ARM-based netbooks? Are the netbook manufacturers waiting for Windows 8, too? What gives? And how about servers? Do we have to wait for Windows 8 before we can save energy by running Linux/*BSD/... on ARM-based servers?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.