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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 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.
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!
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.
Every version of Windows since NT 3.1 has run on architectures other than x86. 3.1 ran on MIPS, Alpha, and x86. 3.5 added PPC. 2000 killed those except Alpha (which was internal-only) and added IA64. XP added AMD64. Win8 is killing IA64 and adding ARM.
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
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?
For the most part, consumers don't care what OS they use. They just want their devices to work. Manufacturers may not care about developing software for their hardware, but they care whether their product has software. The lack of software would mean far fewer sales to consumers. In the past if Asus wanted to make an ARM based laptop, they had fewer choices on the OS and thus the software. Asus could either use Linux or BSD or come up with their own OS. And how many software makers would write software for their laptop? So Asus would have to develop some of their own software just to make it usable to consumers. As you would no doubt agree that Asus doesn't want to develop software at all. They would rather install an OS like ARM based Windows and have MS worry about the software side of things. All of this was before Android which has provided hardware makers with another choice.
So for a hardware maker, they either have to develop an ecosystem for their ARM based hardware or simply not make the device. With Apple and RIM they have gone to the trouble of developing the entire ecosystem. Such a task is not easy nor without risk. For the most part, Apple has succeeded by slowing building their ecosystem over several years. Why Android represents a larger threat than Apple to MS is that Apple is competing with MS for consumer usage indirectly; Android competes with MS directly for OEM partnerships.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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?
You make a lot of assumptions here, and I don't think that they necessarily pan out in practice.
The whole point of using Windows is backwards compatibility.
That's part of it, but it's not the whole story. For instance, I use Windows on my home box partially because I'm one of those strange people who actually like it. (Actually that's not quite true; in reality, I tend to like Linux and Windows about the same, and I dislike both. But the important thing is that Linux and Windows annoy me in different ways, and I use Linux at work, so by running Windows at home I get some variety in my frustration instead of it always being focused on one thing.)
Now I do have some Windows-only software that I use (a couple games and Adobe Lightroom), but 90% of the time I've just got stuff that has easy cross-platform replacements.
Which brings me to my next point:
Microsoft would have to use dynamic translation techniques ... and any power consumption advantage that ARM may have would be more than eliminated.
But what if they only have to use those dynamic translation techniques 5% or 10% of the time? There are a lot of people whose use probably falls under that: most of the time they're using software they could get ARM versions of easily enough, or change to a slightly different program if they couldn't, and then once every few days they'd use a program that would need binary translation.
Now, does that apply to everyone? No. But I think it would apply to most people. (Look at how many people have switched to doing a lot of stuff on their iPhones and iPads.) The bigger question is how savvy you'd need to be to pick up the fact that you should and could get a new version of the software. (And here again I think it'd be reasonably easy to do that.)
Finally, who says that ARM needs to be confined to systems where battery life is important? I'm waiting with somewhat baited breath for more information about nVidia's Project Devner. Those are chips meant for desktops and servers. Will they be good enough to pick over whatever Intel and AMD have out at the time? I dunno... quite possibly not. But they may well be. And that would be very exciting.
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.
Alpha and IA64 both had compatibility modes. IIRC PPC did as well - I don't remember, not having used it, but I've spent a lot of time with Windows on IA64 and its software compatibility is both very good and very fast.
I'm not sure how it was on IA64, I guess it was a virtual machine kind of thing, but I remember people not being that happy
(guess what http://news.cnet.com/Intel-scraps-once-crucial-Itanium-feature/2100-1006_3-6028817.html)
how long until
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).
That's obsolete. As soon as the Itanium 2 came out (~2003) the processor itself was fast enough to get reasonable performance in software mode, through a subsystem called IA-32 EL. The hardware decoder got scrapped since at that point it was useless.
On Windows, that subsystem was totally transparent. Running a Win32 x86 binary on IA64 would happen just like running one on any other Windows system, with no special steps.
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.