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."

Comments

Dumb question - of course they'll say yes.

[tomhudson]

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"?

ARM Windows

[devent]

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.

Re:Good

[Kjella]

RISC won 20 years ago, all x86 processors decode to some internal instruction set. I am certain the engineers at Intel and AMD have tested exposing the native instructions and if it could perform much faster than x86 I'm sure they'd enable applications to bypass the hardware decoder and send micro-ops directly. While they still process the instructions the really obscure ones live in microcode instead of hardware, x86_64 adjusted the number of registers etc. so most things have been tweaked. I don't need to remind you that the last attempt to do better was the Itanic...

Re:Good

[Rockoon]

Most (all?) 64-bit compilers produce SSE single precision and double precision code by default. It is the x87 stack that is the odd-man out, contrary to what you are making it sound like.

All x64 CPU's support both single and double precision SSE, which is why its the default for 64-bit targets. If you are targeting a 32-bit OS, then a 32-bit binary cannot simply assume that single precision SSE is available, let alone the later double-precision support of SSE2.

Also, the x87 FPU performs calculations in 80-bit precision, so is not directly comparable to SSE's single and double precision features.

Finally, it is not "some compilers".. its ALL THE MAJOR ONES, both 32-bit and 64-bit.