Windows Already Up and Running On ARM Architecture

syngularyx writes "Over at Microsoft's MIX Developer Conference in sunny Las Vegas, Microsoft has demoed a new preview build of Internet Explorer 10 (which you too can take for a spin, if you feel so inclined), and also dropped a little premature Easter egg – the build of IE10, and the underlying Windows OS, were both running on a 1GHz ARM chip. Sneaky."

Comments

can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8?

[Joe The Dragon]

can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8?

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone has to set the bar even lower.

Why is it sneaky?

[Jimbookis]

It's about frickin' time! As usual MS take the longest to get on the trend train.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu has support for ARM since 9.04 IIRC

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[mirix]

Debian has supported arm since potato (2000)...

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Daniel Phillips]

It's about frickin' time! As usual MS take the longest to get on the trend train.

It's too little, too late. Even if Microsoft was able to get "true" Windows working perfectly on arm, what about all the 3rd party apps? What about Office? Outlook? Anything that matters in the Microsoft ecosystem?

With arm, Microsoft has to start from zero and compete on a level playing field. Something it has never been good at.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[markdavis]

Exactly. Plus I seriously doubt they are going to get anywhere near the performance or efficiency that Linux (Android Linux, other Linuxes) or iOS does on ARM because they are so late to the game. I bet it would take years to tune it to work "well enough", which would STILL be way behind the competition.

So start with no apps, no performance, no efficiency, and probably not much demand. If they can pull off MS-Windows on ARM as a market success, I would be REALLY surprised.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[VertigoAce]

Office 2010 on ARM was demonstrated during CES in January. Also, .NET apps should be binary compatible. It would not surprise me if it is easier to port 32-bit apps to ARM than it is to port them to amd64.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too little, too late. Even if Microsoft was able to get "true" Windows working perfectly on arm, what about all the 3rd party apps? What about Office? Outlook? Anything that matters in the Microsoft ecosystem?

With arm, Microsoft has to start from zero and compete on a level playing field. Something it has never been good at.

Office is already confirmed on Windows ARM.
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/Features/2011/jan11/01-05SinofskySOC.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/jan11/01-05SOCsupport.mspx

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Elbereth]

What are you calling bullshit on? Where is your evidence that it is indeed bullshit? Do you have anything of value to actually say?

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Lesrahpem]

Just wait until they try to get a patent for this. ;)

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the evidence for anything he said? An argument presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Desler]

He's calling bullshit the fact that Windows has no infrastructure for an ARM release. They already showed off Office for ARM months ago.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Dr Max]

Except it is unbelievably bad at it. touch only works half the time, accelerated graphics hardly ever works, trying to get 3g to work is a pain, accelerometers are practically useless, onscreen keyboard non existent. I think I’ll wait for 11.4 and unity ui to improve before i try it again. I love the concept of a Linux tablet but unless your a super duper programmer its probably not quite there.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[drsmithy]

It's too little, too late. Even if Microsoft was able to get "true" Windows working perfectly on arm, what about all the 3rd party apps? What about Office? Outlook? Anything that matters in the Microsoft ecosystem?

Well, they *own* Office, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem. IE is obviously already working. Between those two they've probably covered the requirements of something like 40-50% of users.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

Not really. Every office I've ever worked in always had Office and at least a couple of other mission critical applications along with it. Be it Quickbooks with various plugins, photoshop, endicia, the ups app for shipping, etc. Office and ie are nothing on arm without the rest of the third party gang along for the ride.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[causality]

Office 2010 on ARM was demonstrated during CES in January. Also, .NET apps should be binary compatible. It would not surprise me if it is easier to port 32-bit apps to ARM than it is to port them to amd64.

AMD64 is capable of running 32-bit code. So, are you saying Windows doesn't have some kind of functional equivalent to Linux's multilib? If not, that would be surprising. One would expect that a port to ARM would be much more difficult than getting 32-bit code to run on AMD64, an operation which has no good reason to require a port.

Note, multilib has nothing to do with Linux's open-source nature. It's how users of 64-bit Linux run things like Adobe Flash which are only available as 32-bit closed-source code (unless you count the "64-bit preview" they are just now offering).

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[drsmithy]

Not really. Every office I've ever worked in always had Office and at least a couple of other mission critical applications along with it. Be it Quickbooks with various plugins, photoshop, endicia, the ups app for shipping, etc. Office and ie are nothing on arm without the rest of the third party gang along for the ride.

The target platform here is not fully-functional desktop PCs with ARM processors, it's tablets and other appliance-style devices.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too little, too late. Even if Microsoft was able to get "true" Windows working perfectly on arm, what about all the 3rd party apps?

It's not a big deal. You just rebuild your software. This story is driving me nuts because I can't break my various NDAs, but I think I'm safe in saying that it's no big deal. Anybody who experiences serious problems due to this shift has got some serious non-portable shit going on in the first place.

Someone below mentioned that Office 2010 was demo'd on ARM. How was that possible? It's possible because you just rebuild. Zero change to source code. Microsoft is many things but they're not retarded. This transition needs to be as easy as possible or people will just go elsewhere, and they DO understand that.

(BTW, I'm just a person who is bound by NDAs with MS, I do not work for MS)

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

Doesn't really matter what kind of device you are referring to, I was remarking more on how delusional one must be to think ie and office meet the needs of 50 percent of consumers. Last I checked, games were what was burning up the sales charts for tablets and smartphones. Neither of which ie or office are.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't likely to expect the exact same game to run on a tablet as on a full desktop PC, so the same point applies.

A web browser and an office suite are probably the two most common pieces of functionality that you will want on any device for nearly every user.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

Really? An office suite on any device for nearly every user? Do people even think about what they are saying?

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[jedidiah]

You may not want to actually edit something on your fondleslab due to it being an entirely inappropriate interface. However, you would certainly want to be able to view any sort of document that you are likely to come across. Even as a basic viewer, a real office app is much better than some crippled thing intended to be nothing more than a viewer.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Daniel Phillips]

They already showed off Office for ARM months ago.

Shown in a demo, but nobody has tried it, I wonder why? Can you provide a link to a review please?

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Daniel Phillips]

The target platform here is not fully-functional desktop PCs with ARM processors, it's tablets and other appliance-style devices.

That's exactly the problem for Microsoft. Nobody is clamoring for Microsoft Office on an ipad, please correct me if I'm wrong :-)

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

Most documents worth viewing on a tablet are in pdf format and there are several very good pdf viewers on iOS and android. It's just disingenuous to imply most people are running around looking at docx and xls files on their tablets which is what the other person I was replying to was trying to say. Since I'm typing this on a Xoom, I took the liberty of checking the market. Documentstogo, an office file editor and viewer is the 11th top selling item. No other office type app is anywhere on the first page. I didn't keep going. To say half of people's needs are met with office (and ie) does not jive with that as there are many apps in other categories that outsell Documentstogo.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[PCM2]

Shown in a demo, but nobody has tried it, I wonder why? Can you provide a link to a review please?

Oh come on, you really think Microsoft Office is written with so much assembly language code that it would require a substantial rewrite to run on ARM?

Getting an application to run on multiple operating systems is hard, sure. But when Microsoft has already implemented the entire Windows OS and all its APIs? They could probably have Office running in a day.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Plus I seriously doubt they are going to get anywhere near the performance or efficiency that Linux (Android Linux, other Linuxes) or iOS does on ARM because they are so late to the game.

Could you provide an example of something that would be inefficient? And what kind of inefficiency are you talking about? Bad compiler output? Bad power efficiency, what?

(I work somewhere where we get access to this stuff, and I've been playing with the ARM compiler and I have not seen anything that makes me think it sucks)

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[linuxrocks123]

Oh, suuuuure. Just rebuild. It'll be fiiiiiiine.

Yeah, man, go see how that works for you. Take it from someone who spent 3 years running Linux on SPARC before giving up in frustration. Even though most things on Linux are MAINTAINED ACTIVELY for basically every architecture thanks to Debian, you'll run into weird little issues like Firefox crashing randomly, X crashing randomly, GhostScript for some reason crashing quite consistently unless you use a crazy old version, and tons of other little annoying problems that eventually force you to switch to Solaris. And this is with people maintaining the code, just not looking at it too much since few people run or report bugs on Linux/SPARC.

"It's not a big deal. You just rebuild your software." What a laugh. News flash: it's very easy to write totally nonportable C if you don't know what you're doing without even realizing it if you're not careful. News flash 2: most Linux/UNIX developers are careful, and they still mess up (per above). News flash 3: most crap Windows developers aren't careful at all.

Microsoft can't even get people onboard for AMD64 yet. And that's an architecture transition that's actually important.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[The End Of Days]

What makes me laugh is that your entire argument for why Microsoft won't be able to get this working is that Linux sucks. I suspect that wasn't the point you were trying to make...

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[exomondo]

It's too little, too late. Even if Microsoft was able to get "true" Windows working perfectly on arm, what about all the 3rd party apps? What about Office? Outlook? Anything that matters in the Microsoft ecosystem?

Have you heard of .Net? All they need to do is write an ARM implementation of the CLR - something i'd wager they've already done - and they're good to go with all .Net apps. Why do you think there was the heavy transition by MS of so many of their apps to the .Net platform with the release of Vista and 7?

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[exomondo]

Exactly. Plus I seriously doubt they are going to get anywhere near the performance or efficiency that Linux (Android Linux, other Linuxes) or iOS does on ARM because they are so late to the game. I bet it would take years to tune it to work "well enough", which would STILL be way behind the competition.

Haven't they been working on minwin for years now? There's no reason to think they will have performance issues given the amount of time they've spent stripping down the kernel. And of course anything written in .Net will run fine assuming they've ported the CLR. Im not sure what you're referring to with 'efficiency'.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[linuxrocks123]

Parent is trolling. I took the bait so I'm giving up karma bonus.

What I'm saying is that Linux on minority architectures that doesn't get much love, such as SPARC, has QA problems, because, no, unlike the assertion I was replying to, "just recompiling" doesn't cut it. Anything written in a C derivative (other than C#, which is really a Java derivative) on Windows will suffer from the same QA concerns that hit Linux on SPARC, which is why some companies don't even port stuff to AMD64. In the proprietary world, you just don't get software on your favorite platform; in the open source world, you get it, but you might not work. I know which I think is better, especially since I'm using much of the same software I ran on Linux/SPARC on Solaris/SPARC now using OpenCSW, and it works better now since more people use Solaris and so it gets more bug reports and therefore more QA.

You want to make an argument that Windows developers -- who typically have no experience with cross-architecture development -- will be better at writing cross-architecture software than Linux/UNIX developers, who typically do, go ahead and make it. I'd love to hear it.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 40-50% was almost certainly hyperbole. Every person who responded to you has treated it as hyperbole, and you're treating it as the whole point. This is the source of this long thread.

Original argument was that porting Windows to ARM will be okay because the most important things to be compatible are browsers, media players, document viewers,

Windows 8 will definitely have a browser and media player built-in, and leaks show a PDF viewer, and it looks like Office will have something for ARM. This is the wrong form factor for photoshop.

The other big elephant in the room is things like games, which aren't expected to be compatible, and are important in aggregate but basically irrelevant on the individual level.

Now you've covered the most crap that people need, even if not everybody needs every one of those. Quickbooks is not going to account for 50% of users. Endicia which I've never heard of won't be 50%. All those 3rd party apps combined? Nearly 100% of users will use SOMETHING out of this set. But for most users, this covers a huge portion of their needs. I really think that even users who use tablets a lot will tend to use the browser and the media player all the time and other things less, other than, again, games. Yes, there will be those tablets where they don't use any browser, and media playing, all meant for their one or small set of business apps. We're talking long tail vs 80-20 rule.

Also, PDF really only replaces a word processor for viewing software. Presentation software could do quite well on a tablet I think, as a viewer. Spreadsheets could be authored by one person on a desktop with fields filled in by many people with tablets -- this happens today with netbooks.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[shutdown -p now]

It's too little, too late. Even if Microsoft was able to get "true" Windows working perfectly on arm, what about all the 3rd party apps? What about Office? Outlook? Anything that matters in the Microsoft ecosystem?

Given that this is still the same OS, with exact same API, anything that's written in C++ without weird hacks (like non-aligned pointer access via casts) should just work after a recompile.

In practice there are probably a few such hacks in most big apps, but key word here is "few". It's nowhere near as hard as, say, porting to OS X or Linux (because you have to rewrite your entire GUI there). So no, it's not a "start from zero" in any meaningful way.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[shutdown -p now]

I believe he referred to porting the actual app to x64 - as in, producing a 64-bit binary as output - and not running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit Windows (which it, of course, is perfectly capable of, in largely the same way as Linux). You'll get more headache there because sizeof(void*) changes, which can be a massive breaking change for poorly written apps which try to fit it in an int or do other silly things like that (unfortunately, a lot of Windows software has code as bad as that, especially various closed source freeware/shareware stuff). In contrast, on ARM, all sizeof values remain the same.

On the other hand, you get headache with unaligned pointer access, which you don't on AMD64, so I'm not sure if one is really better than the other.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[smash]

For office environments, Windows + IE + Office do meet the needs of 50% of workers. If it can't run games, all the better as far as business is concerned.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[VertigoAce]

Yes, I was referring to 64-bit binaries. Pointer alignment was what I was thinking would be the biggest issue for porting typical apps to ARM. I found a couple spots in the compiler documentation that suggest misalignment is already a warning on x86 with a note that it will be an error when compiling for a RISC processor. So hopefully most instances of this would show up as build breaks rather than runtime errors.

I think the IA-64 port of Windows forced any alignment issues in the OS (and SDK) to be addressed.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, IA-64 has forced the addition of __unaligned in particular, and of course the OS API is clean in that respect.

The problem is that unaligned access cannot be reliably detected at compile-time. You can always upcast any pointer to void* (which cannot by itself trigger a warning), pass it around, and then downcast to something else. Even for direct cross-casts such as "(int*)&a_char", they may be perfectly legal if a_char is union'd with int. The compiler can probably catch it when a local has its address taken directly and then immediately cast, but not for much else.

That said, I don't think it's a big deal in practice. I certainly haven't seen many cases where it would matter in C++ code that I've dealt with in the last 5 years.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[gtall]

I wouldn't be surprised. They have PHBs everywhere in thrall. They'll market it as the first smartphone/tablet OS what can work with PHB-Infrastructure. Then the dirty tricks will start. Non-MS phones and tabs that used to sync to winders will suddenly experience "technical" problems. Companies that produce both Android and winders phones will suddenly discover that companies that have standardized on winders will get better deals. Hell, they've already started with Nokia.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

See my answer to the other guy that said this. You've either never worked in a real office or you're lying. There are always other third part mission critical applcations on almost every desktop. Quickbooks, photoshop, and so on. Almost every business on the planet would stop functioning if all software stopped functioning aside from Office and of.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

It wasn't hyperbole, it was pure BS. The intent of the other posters and you yourself is to pretend that windows on arm is automatically a viable platform just because it has a browser and an office suite. To anyone with a real job, that assertion is laughable.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[TheRaven64]

Modern ARM chips will trap to the OS for unaligned loads and stores. You basically have two cases:

If the code looks like it should be an aligned load / store, then the compiler emits a single load instruction. Most of the time, this should be fine. If it isn't, then the CPU raises an interrupt. The kernel examines the current instruction and emulates it (two loads and a shift / mask). This is fast if it really is an aligned access, but very slow (1%, if you're lucky) if it isn't.

If the code doesn't look like it should be an aligned load or store, then the compiler emits two loads and shifts, a mask and an and. The shift is actually rolled into the load instructions on ARM, so you're doing four instructions instead of one. Slower, but not much slower - a similar speed to doing an unaligned load on x86.

The biggest problem with unaligned loads is if they span cache lines, but that's the same problem on x86.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[TheRaven64]

Porting from x86 to SPARC - especially if you mean SPARCv9 - is massively more effort than porting from x86 to ARM. If you're using a high-level language, you won't see many differences between any of them, but for code in a language like C:

• x86 and ARM are both little-endian, SPARC is big endian (actually, ARM can be either, but it's usually little endian).
• x86 has no limitations on alignment (other than unaligned loads / stores being slow). SPARC has strict alignment requirements. ARM traditionally had strong restrictions, but now can raise an interrupt on an unaligned load / store so the kernel can fix it if the compiler missed it (slow, but a lot better than crashing or doing the wrong thing).
• x86 is 32-bit, SPARCv9 is 64-bit. Worse, SPARCv9 was typically ILP64, so any code that made assumptions about sizeof(int) or sizeof(long) would break.

There's a reason that people used to suggest testing on SPARC/Solaris and BSD/x86 - those two combinations covered opposite extremes for the CPU and OS. In contrast, ARM and x86 provide an almost identical abstract model to C developers. Win32 on ARM and Win32 on x86 are going to be pretty much indistinguishable.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[cobrausn]

With arm, Microsoft has to start from zero and compete on a level playing field. Something it has never been good at.

Yeah, like with the console market. They really flubbed that one. [/sarcasm]

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[EndlessNameless]

To anyone with a real job, that assertion is laughable.

My dad's an electrician. He needs access to his email and some spread sheets when he's working. He's covered by the suggested basics, and he ditched his laptop in favor of a smartphone a few years ago.

Care to tell me what you consider a real job? Because I'm pretty sure you're considering only people whose jobs are almost entirely on computers---and ignoring the majority of people who use computers to expediate their non-IT jobs.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[EndlessNameless]

Almost every business on the planet would stop functioning if all software stopped functioning aside from Office and of.

There are no ARM desktops being mass-produced for the corporate desktop. Windows on ARM isn't replacing that platform, so WoA doesn't need its army of third-party apps.

On phones and tablets, most users consume content (web browsing, videos), stay in contact, or view/edit basic documents. Taking WMP, Office, and IE in combination with Flash and Adobe Reader gives a typical office user everything they're expecting on a mobile platform.

Of course there's going to be a help desk application, an ERP database, or a custom accounting app that won't run on WoA. But until Microsoft OEMs try to put ARM into desktops, it doesn't matter.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

My dad's an electrician.

Nice anecdote.

Care to tell me what you consider a real job?

Anything that requires "going to work". Be that from the bedroom to the den or from your house to wherever and anything in between. The contrast I was drawing was between gadget junkie slashdotters pretending that Office and IE comprise all that is necessary to work and people like myself that actually do have a job overseeing the IT in a major company, having spent years in the industry at several such companies and know damn good and well that the stack that makes up the typical computer and facilitates people doing their jobs is much more than just Office and IE for "40 - 50 percent of people". Period. Full stop. The fact that people are arguing this point with me is the laughable part.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[oakgrove]

Windows on ARM isn't replacing [windows on the desktop], so WoA doesn't need its army of third-party apps.

It may not need the particular army of third party apps that makes desktop windows successful but to compete with Android and iOS, it will need an army of them. A couple of first party ports isn't going to cut it. RIM knows this, hence the Dalvik compatibility. Just ask Palm^H^H^H^H HP what happens when nobody develops for your mobile platform.

Taking WMP, Office, and IE in combination with Flash and Adobe Reader gives a typical office user everything they're expecting on a mobile platform.

Yeah, because they are using iPads, Blackberries and Androids. Expectations have been set. They know they're not going to be able to run Office(TM). Give them something with "Windows 8" and they will expect Windows in all its glory. They will be disappointed. Go around your office and look at everybody's personal smartphones or tablets if they have them. Tell me all they have is a media player, documentstogo or whatever, a browser and a pdf reader. Back yet? That's what I thought. People's tablet-y things are full of random apps that are important to them. I'm more inclined to believe people will just keep buying iPads rather than Windows 8 on ARM

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[smash]

Sure, there are custom apps out there. They're usually written in house for windows. Or they're access databases to process data extracted from some unix box or mainframe. Out of the 450 boxes on my network, probably 80 percent are served by a web browser, office and a dumb terminal app.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[man_of_mr_e]

I'd love to have office on my ipad, or at least a subset of it. Outlook, Powerpoint, Word, and Excel. That would TRULY justify the purchase.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[man_of_mr_e]

There is no compelling reason to recompile for AMD64. 32 bit apps run just fine under a 64 bit OS.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Daniel Phillips]

I'd love to have office on my ipad, or at least a subset of it. Outlook, Powerpoint, Word, and Excel. That would TRULY justify the purchase.

Perhaps you bought the wrong kind of computer. I would think that a USB port is essential for any device you hope to use as a general purpose computer. Printer? Mouse? You probably better get adjusted to the idea that your ipad is a glorified TV.

I will grant you that Apple and Microsoft are working well as a team to shoot each other's feet off.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Daniel Phillips]

With arm, Microsoft has to start from zero and compete on a level playing field. Something it has never been good at.

Yeah, like with the console market. They really flubbed that one. [/sarcasm]

Indeed, about 8 $billion worth of flub at last count. While Nintendo knew what they were doing and massively raked in the cash. I call that epic flub.

see, Microsoft's plan was to leverage it's PC games monopoly into a console games monopoly by knocking out Nintendo and Sony. Unfortunately, neither was knocked out so that plan failed and worse, the entire console market was discredited by unreliable hardware. Plus Microsoft diluted its focus in a major way and lost $8 billion or so. Not good at it, you bet.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[man_of_mr_e]

I'm very happy with my iPad, and I do use it for email, light word processing and presentation. No, i don't need a USB port, bluetooth works great. I use my iPad for presentations all the time. Keynote is good, but sometimes i would prefer to have an actual powerpoint. Even an official powerpoint player would be nice.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[cobrausn]

MS (or M$ if you must) plays for the long term. Their rep is better than Sony in the current console market, partially because they handled the RROD situation pretty well, even if they did take a loss. I get the feeling the next set of consoles will pay them back in spades. Just speculation though.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Daniel Phillips]

The mere thought of using an ipad for word processing makes me shudder. Wait, you're also into three legged racing, right?

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[Daniel Phillips]

MS (or M$ if you must) plays for the long term. Their rep is better than Sony in the current console market, partially because they handled the RROD situation pretty well, even if they did take a loss. I get the feeling the next set of consoles will pay them back in spades. Just speculation though.

My working assumption is that the next console generation will not look at all like the current one. In the modern world, console hardware simply can't keep up with general purpose computers. Nintendo got it right: retro/cute thrives while cutting edge dies. Witness how many exclusive franchises both Sony and Microsoft lost this generation.

Or another way of putting it: the console market as we knew it is dead, Sony and Microsoft killed it. This hundred dollar graphics card with 4 times the power of a PS3 or Xbox 360 says I'm right. The future of gaming looks more like Android than it does another round of fire breathing, solder melting walled gardens.

Re:Why is it sneaky?

[man_of_mr_e]

Why? It's perfectly adequate for it, so long as you're using a keyboard (via bluetooth).

Old news...

[Cougar Town]

They demoed this at CES months ago... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ces-microsoft-shows-off-windows-8-on-arm/8339

Compatibility?

[sillivalley]

But... But... But...

How are they going to make it compatible with all those viruses and trojans out there?

/rimshot...

Re:Compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what VBS, C# and .Net is for,

Re:Compatibility?

[raddan]

That's what .NET is for. Hardware-agnostic malware.

Re:Compatibility?

[QuietLagoon]

You need to let go of your Microsoft Windows delusions.

Re:Compatibility?

[aztracker1]

I know this is meant to be funny, but I'm guessing anything beyond hardcore and driver development will be done in .Net or something similar to google's web-app concept... This isn't a bad thing perse, but as android's increased popularity has shown, end user installed malware can be more than effective on a system without root priv's, and some firewall and av protection is probably very prudent still.

Re:Compatibility?

[shutdown -p now]

Didn't you get the memo? You can now write cross-platform trojans in HTML5, and IE9, with its hardware-accelerated engine, will ensure that they run most efficiently!

IE 10 Already?

[Haedrian]

It seems that everyone is going to go for the accelerated releases now.

10 is much bigger than 5 (firefox), so I think IE is going to win.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[Tumbleweed]

It seems that everyone is going to go for the accelerated releases now.

10 is much bigger than 5 (firefox), so I think IE is going to win.

Chrome Canary build is already at 12, though I will admit it's a bit flaky still.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

As always Opera did it first. Opera is on version 11 already!

Re:IE 10 Already?

[hey!]

Pfft. That's nothing. My browser release goes all the way to 11. It also supports the "beating-a-dead-meme" tag.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[TaoPhoenix]

My installer says nothing below win 7 is supported either - are they already leaving Vista in the lurch?

Re:IE 10 Already?

[causality]

Pfft. That's nothing. My browser release goes all the way to 11. It also supports the "beating-a-dead-meme" tag.

Don't worry. Dead memes usually get modded up around here.

For some reason.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that everyone is going to go for the accelerated releases now.

10 is much bigger than 5 (firefox), so I think IE is going to win.

And 98 is much bigger than 8, so Microsoft has it covered both ways....

Re:IE 10 Already?

[cbhacking]

Umm... what version did you expect MS to release following 9 (which came out ~ 1 month ago)? In any case, 10 is nowhere near done - all you can download of it today is a rendering engine review, much like what you could get of IE9 a year ago - so I'd hardly call it "accelerated releases". If Firefox releases at the rate they say they will, I suspect they'll be at 10 by the time IE10 actually ships too... but where it will have been a lot of small changes over the months, IE10 will be a monolithic step up from 9.

Call that good or bad as you will. I'm in favor of getting newer features faster, but speaking both as a software developer who understands the cost of testing a release, and a mostly-former web developer who prefers to have fewer browsers I need to test against, I think the IE approach is possibly more realistic.In the meantime, the "platform preview" builds will give the opportunity to try out newer IE rendering and JS engines as they add features, fix bugs, and improve performance.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[TheThiefMaster]

Why not? Everyone else is.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

They just aren't mentioning it. Soon it shall be forgotten.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

But does Netflix, I mean Netcraf confirm it?

Re:IE 10 Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Win what ? MS has lost this battle years ago. For them there is nothing to win.

Re:IE 10 Already?

[nyctopterus]

In Slashdot Russia, dead meme upmods you!

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[ashvagan]

You probably can, as I think Windows 8 is designed to run on tablets as well as PCs, having totally different shells running for each type.

Window always tested many architectures

[ron_ivi]

I thought one of the biggest Windows / SQL Server computers in the world was the Nasdaq Tandem (now HP) MIPS computer.
http://news.cnet.com/Nasdaq-upgrades-HP-based-trading-system/2110-1010_3-5628950.html
though it seems Microsoft phased it out for other customers:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1996/oct96/mipspr.mspx

Re:Window always tested many architectures

[jd]

Was that really running Windows or just WINE?

Re:Window always tested many architectures

[the linux geek]

The NonStop didn't, and doesn't, run Windows. It runs a custom operating system called NSK, which is somewhat unique (each core runs a copy of the OS).

Re:Window always tested many architectures

[ron_ivi]

Sure it did:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1996/may96/tandmspr.mspx
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/product-review/mips-nt-allied-from-birth

Re:Window always tested many architectures

[the linux geek]

Nowhere does it say the Tandem/Compaq/HP NonStop ran Windows. It didn't. They just licensed some middleware and OS components to Microsoft, which is nothing special. They did the same thing with SCO around the same time.

Re:Window always tested many architectures

[raddan]

You'd think they'd at least port it to MIX for the MIX Conference. False advertising.

Re:Window always tested many architectures

[boss_hog]

actually it was somewhat ironically called NS/UX. (For NonStop UNIX, I believe)

The Tandem hardware architecture was interesting, every piece of hardware in a Tandem was duplicated. backplanes, ram, disk, any and every io path, literally every hw component had a backup. Everything was hooked up like two identical non-fault-tolerant machines within a single cabinet, although with a lot of inter-communication pathways between the two(google servernet). You could actually run two system images on each Tandem if you didn't want the HW-level failsafe redundancy.

not only did each core run a copy of the OS, but I believe all the cores ran the OS in instruction-level lock-step with each other, so that a failure anywhere along the path meant transparent switchover to the backup hardware path.

that all assumes that the switchover did work, and unfortunately it didn't seem to work as smoothly as my company wanted for telco purposes. Eventually it did work halfway decently, but the MIPS processors quickly got surpassed speed-wise by every other processor architecture, and the hardware redundancy became too costly(both reliability-wise, and "do real work"-wise) compared to what could be achieved with software redundancy on faster machines. Tandem boxes were running @ 400mhz in the early 2000's, when virtually everything else was over(and sometimes well over) 1ghz.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this version of Windows still require firewall and antivirus, i.e. bloating of the CPU.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean bloating of the OS, not CPU. And a firewall hardly adds bloat, it's in the kernel (although I must admit I'm not sure if that's where it is in Windows... I sure hope so).

As far as antivirus goes, Microsoft Security Essentials is actually very good, and extremely lean. There's not much reason to use any of the commercial antivirus bloatware anymore.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

and will it run on my PS3?

Re:Question

[causality]

I think you mean bloating of the OS, not CPU. And a firewall hardly adds bloat, it's in the kernel (although I must admit I'm not sure if that's where it is in Windows... I sure hope so).

Windows firewall programs aren't really firewalls, for the most part. They're more like ACLs for API calls involving sockets.

That's why when you run a Windows "firewall" program you don't generally see things like IP addresses, masks, protocols, port numbers, and state information. If you do, it's buried in the menus someplace, not the core function of the program, and likely added as a limited afterthought. They're definitely not a great example of bloat but they are certainly more resource-intensive than something like iptables and the relevant *nix kernel support.

The few times I have used a Windows sytem in the last several years, it was most disappointing. Where you could just write a few rules to cover your needs, now you have to go through a tedious list of programs and incrementally enable each one that may want to use a particular protocol after, of course, having some system tray pop-up distract you from whatever you were trying to get done. Depending on the "firewall", you may have to do it again when you upgrade/update the program since the executable has changed.

Really the only justification for this is the terrible host security of so many Windows systems, which leads to the hope that a strange executable the user has never seen before that wants to use the network might get noticed. It's one of the least efficient ways to operate a firewall. The need to enforce permissions that apply to system calls (of any kind, whether they are related to sockets, disks, etc) should be a core OS function that requires no third-party utilities. The need to regulate network traffic is a different problem that would properly have a different solution.

Honestly it's a fucking inelegant mess but it avoids the BIG SCARY OH NOES!! of requiring users who want to adjust a firewall to know a few things about how networks and firewalls work (sort of like the way we expect people who want to tinker with an engine to have skill as a mechanic and no one calls that unreasonable) or, failing that, to hire/consult someone who does. Like most of the culture surrounding Windows really. For those people who like it this way, use what you like and I say more power to you. To me, it's downright suffocating. I'd much, MUCH rather spend a few minutes reading up on networking, learn it one time, and do it the simple/elegant way from them on, rather than continuously do everything the hard way solely to avoid a little reading.

This set of priorities, more than anything else, is the difference between Windows "computing as a product" and many other systems. You can spend a great deal of time looking at differences in design and technologies without having a satisfying understanding of why things work out the way they do.

As far as antivirus goes, Microsoft Security Essentials is actually very good, and extremely lean. There's not much reason to use any of the commercial antivirus bloatware anymore.

As far as antivirus goes, it's a terrible substitute for a good security system that doesn't treat the user like an illiterate idiot. I'm wondering how much worse the malware problem has to get before more people are willing to admit that antivirus is at best a band-aid and does not address the problem of security. Usually things have to become some big-ass crisis before people are willing to say "you know, the way we've been doing things doesn't work, maybe it's time to try another approach." Until then, those who said all along that something is not sustainable, is moving in the wrong direction, and lacks long-term viability are ignored and marginalized. Too often, that's the way it works.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea what you're talking about, or is the dick in your ass too painful to see past your own bullshit?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

"As far as antivirus goes, it's a terrible substitute for a good security system that doesn't treat the user like an illiterate idiot."

If you ever pulled a couple shifts at a college campus IT help desk you'd be amazed by how many illiterate idiots who get in.

Re:Question

[Locutus]

that hardware already has 1GB of memory and all we see is it's running a browser and not much else. This reminds be of a few days after they showed off what would be Windows NT v3.1 and mentioned the hardware it would require. They quickly mocked up a Windows 3.x with a new UI and started calling it Chicago, the next great Microsoft desktop operating system and stopped calling NT that.

Windows on ARM is going to suck or it won't be anything like the Windows you know( ie it will have to be _vastly_ cut down ). And you know it's going to need antivirus software so start betting on 4+ cores and a couple of gigs of RAM as a minimum configuration. I wonder how small they can make those cooling fans?

LoB

Re:Question

[Osgeld]

windows has a cli and more then 1 decent scripting system directly out of the box ya know, I really dont think your qualifications of "x years ago I messed with a friends big box hp and norton was pissy" is not compelling

Re:Question

[Osgeld]

wow a lot of prediction for a single picture tech demo

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Put the chair down, Steve. Does this guy even work for you?

Re:Question

[exomondo]

And you know it's going to need antivirus software so start betting on 4+ cores and a couple of gigs of RAM as a minimum configuration.

How many viruses have you actually had on your system? what were they?

Re:Question

[drsmithy]

As far as antivirus goes, it's a terrible substitute for a good security system that doesn't treat the user like an illiterate idiot.

Please explain what "security system" performs an equivalent function to a virus scanner.

Re:Question

[dbIII]

The really odd thing is they've had a shining example of how to do the firewall interface available right in their web browsers for years. Snapgear (bought out a few times since that name in a bigger fish eating smaller fish sort of way) made firewalls on network cards (and routers) with a very easy but powerful point and click way to set it all up. Half the ADSL routers on the planet went on to do similar simple interfaces for their firewalls. Meanwhile Microsoft dropped the ball.
I really do not understand why a company that has always been about bringing the stuff out of the server room to the masses does not copy good stuff like that along with everything else they have copied.
The malware problem is already beyond the dreams of SF too bad to publish so if it gets worse it's not going to wake up anyone that is still asleep. We're stuck with "allow by default" forever on that platform, and all we're getting from the vast swamp of malware is people getting frightened into scareware scams.

Re:Question

[weicco]

Windows firewall programs aren't really firewalls, for the most part. They're more like ACLs for API calls involving sockets.

Nothing prevents anyone from writing a decent firewall software. NDIS (that's the kernel interface for network drivers) has nice interface to hook up intermediate drivers into the TCPIP stack. I've written one myself over 10 years ago.

But you are wrong. Those programs are real firewalls. They hook up their own driver to kernel to do the actual monitoring and filtering of packets. Usually they also hook up to higher level in network stack and intercept socket API calls before OS sees them to prevent socket binding operations.

The few times I have used a Windows

Oh! I see you are an expert. Sorry. Forget everything I wrote above ;)

Re:Question

[parlancex]

First of all, what you're saying really only applies to versions of Windows prior to Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. Open the Windows firewall settings up in one of these operating systems and have a look at it some time. Second, I'm not sure why you think port based firewall rules provide more security than process based rules. You almost assuredly have port 80 outbound open on any desktop computer if you plan on browsing the web, which is great because my malware(tm) only makes outbound connections on port 80, using HTTP so it passes any more complex rules looking at the traffic.

Egress filtering has always been a crap-shoot that ultimately fails to enhance security in any significant way, while generally being annoying.

I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[rsborg]

At least based on my MS friend's claims... they probably have many such projects (say, like, a fully functional web-based MS office)
In fact I'd say this is one of those companies where such innovative ideas usually go to die, as they often "might windows or office cashflows".

Now that windows is threatened, then the skunkworks projects get revealed. The battle for ARM dominance is joined and now there are many contenders (WebOS, iOS, ChromeOS, etc).

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact I'd say this is one of those companies where such innovative ideas usually go to die, as they often "might windows or office cashflows".

Having worked at Microsoft, here's my take.

Microsoft's products must be compatible with a huge variety of hardware and software configurations, with at least 10 years of backward compatibility. Yes, Microsoft has redundant projects and a lot of prototypes that never see the light of day. But it's better to kill an internal ARM build than to release a version which won't play nice with existing environments.

Believe me, Microsoft has a lot of smart engineers, programmers and researchers. Most people have NO IDEA of the level of talent that exists in Microsoft Research. At the same time, Microsoft is a huge company which must cater to the interests of businesses which insist on using IE6. Thus, it generally can't afford the luxury of breaking compatibility for the sake of agile development.

Of course, this is one side of the story. Management also makes mistakes.

If you must remember something, consider this: Microsoft doesn't want ARM Windows to be like Vista.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[maccodemonkey]

Historically Microsoft's biggest problem is they feel Windows is the solution to every problem, which has started to not work so well (the worst examples being Windows Tablet Edition and Project Origami, with the later absolutely blowing up in Microsoft's face, ever seen an Origami device in the wild?). It's the same old Windows running on a new processor. If "innovative" is "we ported to ARM" then Microsoft is not going to win this battle. And I don't feel as if Microsoft running the same operating system on a different chip is them joining the battle at all, just make the same old mistakes.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[steelfood]

Preposterous! That's like claiming they grab the best talent just so that nobody else can.

Oh wait...

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

as they often "might accidentally windows or office cashflows".

FTFY

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

why would you want a fully functional web-based ms office? so you can have the privilege of paying a monthy service fee while your data is tethered to a noose?

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[Locutus]

like the vast resources they put into getting Windows to run on the OLPC XO? It was like one guy and it could hardly do much more than boot. If they really had a mean lean version of Windows, they would have released it for the XO and for things like the comparatively bloated ClassMatePC by Intel. They didn't and instead used a cut down version of Windows XP which also could hardly do much and required diesel generators located outside the classrooms to power the laptops.

I think you have it wrong. Microsoft gets threatened, and then reacts. They've survived doing this for decades because the threats were always eliminated via leveraging existing Windows channels, software, or partners. This is a new game and it can't leverage existing Windows systems because the software is incompatible. They probably wish they were far far more proactive pushing the MS .Net platform on all ISVs. So what we are seeing now is much like what we saw in the 90s where they used mockups and prototypes along with great press releases to sucker people into thinking something was close and something was ready. I really doubt this pig is going to fly and if they do get it off the ground, it'll be in a couple of years and probably vastly different from what you expect from a "Windows" experience. IMO

LoB

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[jedidiah]

...yes of course, just gloss over the significance of management here.

"Talent" at Microsoft has never been the problem. It's always been about management and what their values and strategic direction are.

Vista is probably a shining example of that. Not to mention XP.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[aztracker1]

other than floss ports to windows and some games.., I can't think of many apps that aren't in .net recently (or other portable platforms, java, python, ruby etc) over native apps... as long as the api support is good, .net aps should be a sinch... Time to double-down on Unity Technologies, I would say...

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[exomondo]

while your data is tethered to a noose?

mixed metaphor much?

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be interesting to see a compilation of all the might-have-been code get released in the wild.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[swb]

Why wouldn't they, given how much money they have?

How much would it cost them to have a build of the kernel for every major CPU architecture out there? Even if the only purpose is to keep the kernel architecture agnostic so that if they wanted/needed to in the future port to some new CPU they could.

It might be a little impractical to have a fully running install given the number of "custom" hardware platforms out there, but again, if one platform becomes more interesting than others, I can see where they might make a run at getting a minimal install actually running.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if they had managed to hack iPads to boot Windows, for example, or if they've had full installs running on SPARC or Power CPUs.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[rayd75]

At the same time, Microsoft is a huge company which must cater to the interests of businesses which insist on using IE6.

I love this statement. I can't tell you how big my smile is right now. I work in corporate IT and I can give you some insight on this. You see, Microsoft's business customers don't give a damn about using IE6. What they care about is not having to re-write or re-purchase software every couple of years when it's been implemented at great expense. They also don't like being forced into an OS upgrade just to run a newer browser. Remember that insanely-long stretch where XP was supported, got browser updates, and retained meaningful compatibility with new releases of other Microsoft software, particularly corporate IT freebies such as management tools? Yeah, those of us who bought the Windows 2000 spiel got dumped in something like 18 months. Plan the project, buy PCs, roll out Windows 2000 and by the time you're done, it's a XP world according to Microsoft. Expect a service pack for your three year old OS? Are you crazy? Want to upgrade the "integrated" browser after 18 months? No way! Expect new management tools to run on your 18 month old machine? Screw you! Even now that it's largely a XP and 7 world, many customers don't want to spend the money to upgrade software that, had Microsoft not been trying to embrace and extend the browser, should have survived a simple browser upgrade without issue.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[rayd75]

Historically Microsoft's biggest problem is they feel Windows is the solution to every problem, which has started to not work so well...

II agree to a point, but I think an even larger problem for Microsoft is that they wholeheartedly believe the Windows brand has value. One has to wonder why they'd think that the typical customer's experience with "Windows" would impart goodwill and loyalty to the architecturally and visually unrelated Windows Phone when they decided to name it that. I doubt they would have been on track to take a meaningful share of the smartphone market in any case, but I can't help but believe their sales would be better had they just dropped the "Windows" BS and called it something else. For that matter, they might do well to drop the Microsoft name altogether for consumer products and market them under a subsidiary.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[man_of_mr_e]

What's interesting is that you're right, but for the wrong reasons. Longhorn (the codename for what eventually became Vista) was very poorly managed and was a disaster. The reason that it was poorly managed is that most of Microsofts attention and resources were spent on rewriting XP for XP SP2. It wasn't until after SP2 shipped that they turned their attention back to the fiasco that Longhorn had become. After some more undulating and twisting, they finally shit canned it and started over with XP SP2 code base.

Vista was expected to be an unwelcome release, and a bomb. That's why Windows 7 was planned for release a mere 18 months later. They knew people would cry blood murder over UAC, and they knew that people would not react well to increased lock down. Vista was a martyr, sort of like a drill sargeant sent in to break down the troops, so that everyone will be happy with the much nicer, but still strict commanding officer that comes later.

It was actually a very brilliant move in many ways, and Vista was not at all a failure because it achieved the goal of getting people used to locked down security, and forcing app developers to adapt to new security policy.

And if you think that this wasn't planned, you aren't looking at history. Windows 2000 was the same sort of thing. Although not as severe. Windows 2000 introduced a lot of new policies and ways of doing things. XP shipped a mere 18 months after Windows 2000, and it basically made XP very popular.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[man_of_mr_e]

Windows 2000 and XP were not that dissimilar. There shouldn't have been many differences between rolling out Windows 2000 versus XP. XP SP2 was a different story, but that was 3 years later.

IE6 was supported on Windows 2000 up until it was End of Lifed last year. IE7 didn't ship until 2007, and IE6 was supported on 2000 up until that time.

Re:I'm sure they had it skunkworks years ago

[man_of_mr_e]

Origami failed for a lot of reasons, but the Windows OS wasn't really one of them. The problems were that the hardware was expensive, and under powered. They used crappy resistive touch screens that had poor resolution. They were power hungry (mostly because the displays were designed for in-dash GPS's of cars, and not power sipping portable devices) and they were heavy.

Basically, the technology wasn't ready yet. If they had cheap capacitive screens, low-power LED backlighting (rather than power hungry CF lighting), and could make the things cost half the price... they probably would have been much more successful. Although, granted, they would still need to develop multi-touch and other OS technologies to make them more usable.

Windows on ARM for eight(?) years

[perpenso]

It's about frickin' time! As usual MS take the longest to get on the trend train.

Windows CE has been running on ARM for about eight (?) years.

Re:Windows on ARM for eight(?) years

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This makes me wonder about what MS has in mind for WinCE, actually. Have they decided that CE just isn't worth it, and it is going to be EOLed and/or consigned to only the lowest-end embedded/realtime stuff, with an NT derivative replacing it on all higher specced embedded devices? Is there a body of software(their own, or 3rd party), that they have commitments to do an architecture port, if win32-on-ARM is available, that they couldn't get commitments to port to the kinda-sorta-a-bit-win32 world of WinCE?

It just seems strange, since NT on ARM is going to break binary(and possibly to some degree source) compatibility with absolutely everything that isn't 100% pure CLR, that they would bother to port NT, unless they had concluded that CE was beyond hope, or that it would be cheaper to maintain a single kernel.

Given NT's multiplatform history, it doesn't surprise me that they could do it, I just don't really understand why they would... With WP7 they already have a CE-based embedded platform for running CLR applications, and kernel-level stuff like drivers isn't going to survive a architecture transition, so I'm genuinely curious what the plan is.

Re:Windows on ARM for eight(?) years

[jrumney]

Windows CE has been running on ARM for about eight (?) years.

Windows CE 2.0 came out in November 1997 with support for DEC's StrongARM processor (now evolved into Marvell's Xscale range).

Re:Windows on ARM for eight(?) years

[Anonymous Coward]

With WP7 they already have a CE-based embedded platform for running CLR applications, and kernel-level stuff like drivers isn't going to survive a architecture transition, so I'm genuinely curious what the plan is.

Be careful with that assumption, I've written drivers for Windows and the Windows Driver Kit, believe it or not, does actually strongly discourage platform specific code favouring APIs and Macros provided by the Kernel instead. Any drivers written following the guidelines will generally work fine after a recompile.

It just seems strange, since NT on ARM is going to break binary(and possibly to some degree source) compatibility with absolutely everything that isn't 100% pure CLR, that they would bother to port NT, unless they had concluded that CE was beyond hope, or that it would be cheaper to maintain a single kernel.

It makes sense generally speaking, especially with the new Windows Lite design of 2008 which crams a bootable NT system into <100MiB minus most of the GUI and support applications. Maintaining 2 separate kernels and OS environments is not simple or cheap, especially when they are supposed to be sort-of compatible with each other. CE is basically redundant, if a cut-down NT** system can be made to work on the same platform then it's just more sensible from both a practical and economic standpoint to use NT instead. There are also plenty of Windows programmers, even though the existing software won't work, the ability to sit down and code a new application using existing skill-sets without having to learn a new platform is good leverage. I suspect that most programs which are already portable between 32bit and 64bit Windows would actually compile and run fine on ARM (little-endian mode) without changes as well, as long as they didn't go overboard on the inline assembler.

I get the feeling that this was in the pipeline from the start since WP7 doesn't have a native API, the pure-CLR apps will port right over to the NT-ARM environment without much trouble. WP8 or 9 may switch to the NT kernel then start bringing in parts of the userland after that. I could easily be wrong though, this may actually go nowhere at all, it wouldn't be the first time a proof of concept NT port never actually came to market.

** As sneer worthy as it may seem, NT isn't really any heavier than the Linux kernel on its own, it's the Win32 userland on top of it that causes the problems.

Re:Windows on ARM for eight(?) years

[ZosX]

Given the relative power of handheld devices today, it would make a lot of sense for them to work on one codebase and adapt different UIs. Android is doing this and this has been the strategy for meego from the start. WP7 is probably going to become the next feature phone OS. I don't see microsoft making many inroads against android with their current offering.

Re:Windows on ARM for eight(?) years

[oakgrove]

Proof positive that marketing works! The parent can't tell the difference between wince and winnt. Wow. Just wow.

Re:Windows on ARM for eight(?) years

[perpenso]

Proof positive that marketing works! The parent can't tell the difference between wince and winnt. Wow. Just wow.

Wow, what a bad guess. CE or NT is irrelevant to whether MS has supported ARM, or as the original post put it: joined the ARM trend. They are not joining it, they are offering an additional operating system.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Dan East]

If Android has not been made to run on Apple iOS hardware, then it's very, very doubtful that Windows can be made to do so, as the source code isn't even available.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[schnikies79]

Except that is Android does run on iOS hardware, good point.

http://www.idroidproject.org/

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been done. Ages ago. http://www.google.com/search?q=android+on+iphone

Chromium

[Anonymous Coward]

Beats both with a score of 12

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[schnikies79]

Wow, no more posting when I'm half asleep! :/

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[the linux geek]

ARM isn't standardized like x86 is, so probably not... at least not easily. IBM PC clones use a fairly standard set of firmware and peripherals, whereas ARM-based machines tend to be largely custom, just with a degree of binary compatibility between them. Getting Windows running on an iDevice would take serious work.

IE really needs to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

Make a final "IE legacy for corporate use only" for legacy intranets and redirect all consumers and new businesses to browserchoice and make international versions especially browserchoice.cn/.jp/.kr because of IE worship there. Also Gecko, Presto, Webkit and others need to combine into one unified HTML5 engine so that browsers can compete with add ons and interfaces instead of having to worry about fragmented rendering engines.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[hairyfeet]

What amazes me is how many of the young 'uns here are surprised, whereas we old guys remember when MSFT brought over Dave Cutler his big thing was portability and he had WinNT running on just about every chip out there.

So I wouldn't doubt they've kept a division of MSR going with an up to date portable version of the NT code base. what I don't see how they can keep from getting bit in the ass on is if they name it Windows people are gonna expect Windows apps to work which of course they most assuredly WON'T, not without a recompile that most companies simply won't do.

that is one I will hand to the F/OSS guys, if they want to run F/OSS OSes on the old Motorola 68k or any other chip they can do so if they spend the time recompiling it for the arch. Too much of Windows value is tied up in third party code that will simply not get off x86 anytime soon, and without it windows is pretty much worthless. After all people aren't gonna buy Windows licenses just to play Solitaire.

Web server running Windows on Arm?

[SpaceLifeForm]

PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 7C82A01A

Re:Web server running Windows on Arm?

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 7C82A01A

Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.

hrm...not much better is it.

Users will hate it. [depending]

[wierd_w]

Assuming that Microsoft doesnt jump the shark and do something totally unlike their past releases, like overtly junking all back-compatibility with x86 legacy applications (I see this windows offering being adapted for use on the emerging tablet market, where existing legacy application support, even if crippled, would be a big selling point), this offering will be technologically inferior to the existing (and based on more portable technologies) offerings like iOS and Android.

The reason is because this new windows flavor will have to JIT emulate the x86 instruction set for those legacy apps, and do all kinds of calisthenics to make shit happen between native binaries and emulated binaries. The ARM cpu uses less power, but is also somewhat more gutless compared to desktop x86 chips. It will suck hard trying to emulate that bloated dinosaur of an instruction set.

If microsoft finally sacrifices the holy vestal virgin of legacy compatibility (Its major strongpoint in corporate environments by a long shot-- Look at the immense power of zombie IE6) for its ARM port, it will suffer the same fate as all the previous alternative architecture builds (PPC, SPARC, Itanium, et al.)-- That is to say, it will die on the vine because users will hate it with purple pasion.

I am curious to see how microsoft pulls this off. If they were smart, they would do something similar to what Apple did when they switched from PPC to x86 commodity chips, and incorporate a special abstraction layer like Roseta. (Note, I am NOT an apple fanboi-- If you call me one, you are an idiot. Just pointing out something I thought apple did that was interesting.)

Sadly, like so many things microsoft does these days, it will probably be filled with so much useless bloat and duct-tape code that it will run like congealed dogpoo even on high end ARM hardware when trying to do such legacy support-- (again, if they even do it at all.)

I will reserve further judgement until I see it in the wild. It might be great-- but I wont get my hopes up.

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[Anonymous Coward]

MS is expanding into the ARM market, not switching into it (and out of x86/AMD64).

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[walshy007]

They already have the solution to that,. .net, it is just in time compiled on x86 too and so once they port the .net framework over all things written in it will work just fine.

Sure you will lose native x86 compatibility, but there are many apps already out in .net that will work just fine, and you can code for x86 windows and arm windows in the same way.

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[JimboG]

Unless Microsoft just drop all but the most uncomplicated software that is... There is probably a lot more money is selling people 'Windows Tablet 8' software than letting them run Office XP anyway. You're right though, to gain any market share there will need to be some great advantage like running legacy software.

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[Mia'cova]

The main target for ARM will be touch-tablets. It's likely that emulation would be fast enough to handle the old legacy apps. They were built for slower computers after all. If you were to put win8 on a ipad like device, the app-store could sandbox things in the same way that win phone 7's x-app system does. For native stuff, If MS releases a decent compiler, I don't see any reason why companies like adobe wouldn't offer arm versions as well to avoid the emulation layer. And besides, it's hard to know how well a comparatively slow ARM chip will be at emulating x86 code. One advantage is they'll typically be paired with SSDs rather than traditional hard disks. By the time win8 ships, a dual-core ARM with an SSD will probably be mid-level hardware. They aren't doing this to target the very high-end. I'd consider the original ipad to be a mid-grade device now, and perhaps a good min-level target for win8. We know that IO heavy apps perform orders of magnitude better with an SSD. That might be enough of a boost that most any event-driven legacy x86 app will still feel pretty quick and responsive, even with that emulation overhead. And hopefully the JIT/natively-compiled and sandboxed games perform well as well!

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[Locutus]

I always loved how we kept hearing about Windows X being a new OS written from the ground up yet along comes an exploit which attacks a flaw in code which spans versions all the way back to 3.x or something like that. They obviously do not clean up the hundreds of MB of system DLLs and so the bloat just keeps rolling on. That kind of stuff will not fly when they have to make that pig move like a Jackie Joyner-Kersee while it lugs around the weight of Melissa McCarthy. IMO

LoB

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[rsborg]

The reason is because this new windows flavor will have to JIT emulate the x86 instruction set for those legacy apps, and do all kinds of calisthenics to make shit happen between native binaries and emulated binaries. The ARM cpu uses less power, but is also somewhat more gutless compared to desktop x86 chips. It will suck hard trying to emulate that bloated dinosaur of an instruction set.

The reason Microsoft has been pushing .NET, C# and the CLR comes to fruition; As I understand it, fully managed .NET code effectively has it's own JIT, devs just have to recompile for ARM. Has Microsoft finally learned Apple's lessons? What next, their move to LLVM based compilers?

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[aztracker1]

I'm guessing with 8 they'll dump direct support for a lot of legacy apps, and on x86 have some transparent (to the user) vm for sandboxed legacy app support... Most new apps will probably target .Net ...

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[Com2Kid]

If microsoft finally sacrifices the holy vestal virgin of legacy compatibility (Its major strongpoint in corporate environments by a long shot-- Look at the immense power of zombie IE6) for its ARM port, it will suffer the same fate as all the previous alternative architecture builds (PPC, SPARC, Itanium, et al.)-- That is to say, it will die on the vine because users will hate it with purple pasion.

Except that if this is a consumer orientated release, back compat is not nearly as important. Old games don't run, but old games don't run on ANY of the tablet platforms.

Having a usable and responsive UI, ease of use, and hitting a good price point are more important than back compat for a consumer device. Being able to run Office is another plus.

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[dhavleak]

I will reserve further judgement until I see it in the wild

You mean you held something back?

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[AmiMoJo]

You are missing one of the biggest reasons people use Windows - business network integration. Admins love being able to administer desktops and laptops remotely, and now they will be able to do it with phones, tablets and thin clients too. Supporting Android, iOS and Blackberry phones is a pain in the arse at the moment but a Windows based system would be able to use Active Directory.

MS are moving away from long term legacy support now anyway. If you look at the support lifetimes for newer products they are shorter than the old ones, and have done a lot to ease migration. Vista and 7 dropped support for a lot of old tech too, e.g. the gameport, and now the x64 version is the main one 16 bit support is no longer available on most new PCs. Vista was so shit because it had to do so much to keep legacy code working, but once it had been out for a few years they could release Windows 7 and ditch even more old stuff because apps had already been updated to the Vista native way of doing things. To make sure developers didn't rely on legacy compatibility they created the much hated UAC prompts, the idea being that devs would want to avoid bombarding the user with them and thus fix their code. It largely worked.

I would be surprised if they bother with x86 compatibility now.

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[Anonymous Coward]

And absolutely no one has ever use un-managed or native code in a .net application and said:
"It only runs on Windows* so doing this is ok"
*Implying x86

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[Vectormatic]

Supporting Android, iOS and Blackberry phones is a pain in the arse at the moment but a Windows based system would be able to use Active Directory.

the phone companies (and users) are gonna love that one. Watching your computer take 20 minutes to boot up is bad enough, now imagine doing that with a phone over spotty 3G data connections...

Re:Users will hate it. [depending]

[man_of_mr_e]

devs don't have to recompile anything with .net. The same binary will work on ARM systems without change, so long as it doesn't require any native code like a native DLL or OCX.

Reality check

[jmorris42]

Yes Microsoft is going to chase the trend and make something for ARM, otherwise they cede the mobile space to Apple and Google. However, while they will call it Windows 8 it won't bear much relationship to the x86 edition we all know and either loath or love.

1. Anyone think Microsoft (or any of their hardware OEM partners) are remotely interested in releasing what we think of as an Operating System on a new mobile platform? Not when they can lock it down hard and rake in the same 30% Apple gets from their app store. Do not think it an accident Microsoft also leaked screenshots of thier app store this week.

2. No, it won't run any existing Windows apps. ARM is puny, x86 is strong. x86 can emulate ARM (see iOS and Android dev environments) but there is no way ARM is going to emulate x86 apps at a usable speed. Assuming of course I'm totally full of crap on point one and unsigned apps were somehow permitted in the first place. Exception possible for .NET projects with no native code, but again see point one.

3. Even if you could, smartphones and tablets are a different environment so an existing Windows app would be lame.

4. Microsoft has ported Windows in the past. They even got some of their own apps running. I'm told Alpha even had most of Office running native vs via FX!86 before the end. But 3rd party buy in wasn't there and they suffered something similar to the fate of Linux. No 3rd party apps means no large deployements which means no interest by developers to port the 3rd party apps. If Microsoft can make cross porting totally painless this time they might have better luck, but again see point one and three. Just having an ARM binary of Photoshop crap out of Visual Studio along with the x86_32 and x86_64 copies won't result in a product Adobe would be willing to sell to tablet customers. Also have to wonder if they will like giving Microsoft 30%. Yes the normal retail path eats more but BestBuy isn't out to kill them.

So if Windows on ARM gains little from the existing catalog of "Windows" applications, will almost certainly require more robust hardware (battery life is issue one) to run it vs Ubuntu or Android and might even piss off customers who won't realize that Windows != Windows will it get traction?

Re:Reality check

[baka_toroi]

Regarding point 3, you do realize Microsoft already has Windows Phone 7 for those kinds of form factor, right? Windows 8 would be a traditional Windows -Physical keyboard and mouse Windows- that happens to run on top of the ARM architecture. Existing apps will work just fine, at least from an UI point of view. Also, soon (2012) quad core ARMs are going to be available. With proper, optimized emulation, x86 apps should run OK. At least, not slower than a low-end Atom.

Re:Reality check

[cryptoluddite]

but there is no way ARM is going to emulate x86 apps at a usable speed.

When people usually talk about emulater speeds it's running the whole OS, virtual box style. But in this case the Windows OS and all the standard APIs would be running native ARM so it would only be the application code itself that was emulated. There are plenty of apps written in say Python that are maybe 1/30th the speed of a native app but still plenty usable.

Combine a native OS with the experts they have on JIT tech (CLR is really hard to JIT, so you know these people are wicked good) and tons of cores on future ARMs so each thread gets its own core... I don't know man I think it's totally possible.

Re:Reality check

[Calibax]

Why do you think Microsoft is only doing this for mobile platforms?

Didn't nVidia announce at CES that they are developing a 64-bit higher performance ARM processor? They claim it will be suitable for "personal computers to servers and supercomputers" with "awesome performance". And have integrated nVidia graphics as well.

If that does indeed come to pass, we will have a whole different ballgame,

Re:Reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

> (see iOS and Android dev environments)

Xcode doesn't emulate ARM, it provides x86/x86_64 version of all of the iPhone libraries which developers test against. The app isn't compiled for ARM until it is targeted for a device.

Re:Reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, most of the JIT languages we have now use bytecode that was designed to either be easy to interpret or easy to JIT compile down to machine code.

x86/64 code is pretty much the opposite. Relatively more complex instructions, of variable width, and with 15 years of floating point extensions. Microsoft already had to do this once - getting original Xbox games running on the 360 - and from what I remember, that wasn't completely successful. And that was going over to more powerful hardware. Also, it's not just the x86 executable that needs to be figured out, but also any x86 libraries bundled with the program.

At the very least, they'll probably limit it to only programs that ran in win7 (without older-windows compatibility mode). Then they might have a chance of getting 90% of programs to run 90% correctly and at 90% speed (for an equivalently powerful x86 system), and dumping a lot of effort into making sure the main windows programs (Office suite and so on) fall within that 90%. But I suspect it'll be a so-so thing for the first generation. Naturally, stuff that was painstakingly optimized to be fast on an x86 will lose the benefit of those optimizations when JIT-converted to ARM, and for a few programs this may make them drastically slower than others. Microsoft will be trying to just get a foothold at that point, and hoping that the next wave of ARM chips (like the quad core A-15 nvidia is working on, which is supposedly somewhat comparable to a low end core2 duo) will pick up the slack. Their main goal is really to stop any other ARM OS from dominating, since iOS, android/chrome, and linux are all already established platforms that work on ARM.

Not so sunny

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's been cloudy the last week.

So what? It's the apps ....

[yelvington]

Running the OS on an ARM chip isn't even half the battle. What about the apps? Has Microsoft created a "fat binary" format, the way Apple did for its migration from PowerPC to Intel? Are the development tools ready? Are all the Windows application developers lined up to recompile and migrate? How much of that stuff is still tangled up in assembler, anyway?

Microsoft's advantage has always been the breadth of its ecosystem. Now that's Microsoft's disadvantage. There's not much point to owning a power-miserly ARM-based Windows machine if the apps you've come to depend on aren't available. You might as well swallow the medicine and migrate to a more secure, stable OS with a future.

Re:So what? It's the apps ....

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Has Microsoft created a "fat binary" format, the way Apple did for its migration from PowerPC to Intel?

.EXE files are called Portable Executables. They can already hold more than one program with more than one architecture. Microsoft has been using this since the NT 3.1 days when NT was also available on Alpha architecture, and even today with various server editions of windows running on itanium.

Re:So what? It's the apps ....

[yuhong]

False, PE has never supported fat binaries. Instead, they encouraged separate directories for each arch. AutoRun has also supported separate sections for each arch.

Re:So what? It's the apps ....

[pclminion]

The PE format most decidedly doesn't support fat EXEs. Read the spec, page 12, if you need proof. There's only one field in the file for the architecture type, and that field can only hold one value. There are no currently documented methods for embedding multiple PE sections for multiple architectures into a single file. That isn't to say there isn't some way it could be shoehorned in, but as of yet, there is no way to have a fat EXE on Windows.

Re:So what? It's the apps ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Look apple obviously did it first because that what every body 'knows'

Re:So what? It's the apps ....

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you explain Wine, then?

Re:So what? It's the apps ....

[TheRaven64]

Actually, there is a semi-supported shim that lets you do this. You set the type of the PE to .NET, and then start the executable with a tiny CLR program that selects the correct binary format from one of the other sections and invokes it. There's a similar stub that works for loading DLLs. I think this hack was created for Wince (which ran on MIPS, PowerPC, and ARM) but it would probably work on WinNT too.

Re:So what? It's the apps ....

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the little MS-DOS program at the beginning? That's already two-in-one!

Ironically, it prints "This program cannot be in run in DOS mode".

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure .NET apps should work though, which will assist Microsoft in eliminating non-managed languages.

Can symantec to catch up?

[bl8n8r]

No way I'd run it without antivirus.

Re:Can symantec to catch up?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no way I'd use the bloated Norton on a system like this.
I'll stick with MSE

Windows,

[Sene]

is finally ARMed...

Better word: Desprate

[JoeCommodore]

For some reason I think the better word is "Desperate" Like they notice their customers (well they assume they are customers) jumping on a new ship...

Re:Better word: Desprate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we heard plenty of this banter years ago about MS ruining Linux too because they were oh so desperate. You going to keep pulling that one on us? LOLZ!!

Didnt NT3 run on ARM and

[aussersterne]

Alpha and several other non-x86 platforms?

I seem to recall this was back when Windows NT Workstation was aspiring to supplant Unices on a variety of Unix vendor hardware in the early '90s.

Re:Didnt NT3 run on ARM and

[Amazing Quantum Man]

NT4 ran on x86, Alpha, PPC, and MIPS

Re:Didnt NT3 run on ARM and

[jrumney]

NT has never run on ARM before, but several other RISC platforms:

• NT 3.1, 3.5: MIPS, Alpha, x86
• NT 4.0: MIPS, Alpha, x86, PowerPC
• 2000: x86, ia64 (Alpha was supported up to RC2 then dropped before release)
• XP, 2003: x86, x64, ia64
• Vista, 2008, 7: x86, x64
• 8: x86, x64, ARM

Re:Didnt NT3 run on ARM and

[Necron69]

I know many people at HP who worked on the never released PA-RISC version too. Windows 2008 R2 is supported on Itanium right now.

Windows had been a multi-platform OS since the NT days. This is absolutely nothing new for anyone not fresh out of college.

Necron69

Re:Didnt NT3 run on ARM and

[cbhacking]

Close. Server 2008 (6.0) and 2008 R2 (6.1) are also on ia64 (Itanium). They've announced that Itanium support is being dropped for future releases ("Windows 8", whatever its NT version number will be) though.

Computer vs Big Phone

[danparker276]

Lets see Apple run their Mac OS or whatever they got on a tablet.

Re:Computer vs Big Phone

[ceoyoyo]

Was that a joke?

Darwin, which is the actual OS underlying OS X is also the actual OS underlying iOS, which runs on iPhones and iPads. It's also open source.

Re:Computer vs Big Phone

[Anonymous Coward]

They could, but don't want to. MS has been running the full windows on a tablet for 10+ years, and the market has mostly rejected it.

Re:Computer vs Big Phone

[danparker276]

I ment operating system. You can't even run flash.

Re:Computer vs Big Phone

[ceoyoyo]

OS is short for operating system. Flash has nothing to do with the operating system.

I know Slashdot has gone downhill in the last ten years, but are you sure you're on the right site?

Re:Computer vs Big Phone

[MightyYar]

Can't or doesn't?

Re:Computer vs Big Phone

[jedidiah]

Flash has everything to do with the operating system.

The OS is what allows ANY THING to happen on a computer. It's what determines whether or not you have a real general purpose computational device or an appliance pretending to be something that it is not. PhoneOS disallows any number of things and just ignores others.

In the end, nearly nobody cares that the scaffolding underneath the proprietary GUI bits are Free Software. Nearly no one interacts with those parts of the system. On PhoneOS in particular, you aren't even allowed to see those parts of the system by default.

The only way you can verify for yourself that PhoneOS is a Darwin variant is to commit acts that Apple would declare illegal if they could.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Eliminate but not quite. The future of Windows is one where only authorized driver developers, Adobe, and game companies are allowed to run native code.

Fortunately Windows will probably be all but dead by then (except for in the business world).

How many applications do they have?

[dido]

The real value of Windows is in the massive installed base of applications that it has. I wonder how many vendors of important Windows applications will release an ARM build. I do hope that it will be as simple (for the most part) as recompiling the same source in an ARM-based build environment, but even so I wonder how many developers would do it. Good luck getting all those legacy VB6 apps running on ARM Windows though, or any other app for which the source is gone. Without the application ecosystem one might as well be using some other platform.

Re:How many applications do they have?

[R3d M3rcury]

I wonder how many vendors of important Windows applications will release an ARM build.

Depends on how much Microsoft decides to pay them. Microsoft is not above using it's hoard of cash to inspire such things.

To me, it depends on what these things are going to be used for. If the theory is that my next PC/Laptop will run on an ARM chip, this could be an issue. If the theory is that my new tablet or netbook or large phone is going to run on an ARM chip, I probably don't want to port a desktop-like UI to that because it simply won't sell.

I probably don't want to run those legacy VB6 apps on a large phone...

Re:How many applications do they have?

[jbplou]

VB6 all depends on if MS chooses to build in the runtimes into Windows 8. I would be more worried about native COM.

Re:How many applications do they have?

[aztracker1]

Any app written in vb6 should run fine in an emulated environment , I would expect a modern arm 1.2ghz cpu to run around a 400mhz pentium-2 comparable speed common when vb6 was king.

Re:How many applications do they have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they achieve x86 binary capability, can you imagine how godawful the battery life on such a device would be? The things that give iOS and Android their strength are not that they run on ARM hardware, but that they are lightweight and don't suck down battery. And with something bloated like Windows, not only will everything take longer, it will do it in the most roundabout inefficient way. I also have these nightmares of full malware backwards compatibility only it runs slower and has a connection to the internet that costs $500/GB.

Umm... So?

[jcr]

When has anyone ever wanted Windows on anything but x86? Anyone else remember NT on MIPS, DEC Alpha, HPPA, etc?

-jcr

Already?

[srwalter]

They're something like a decade late to the ARM party. "Already" is hardly the right work for it.

Re:Already?

[cbhacking]

WinCE has run on ARM for a decade. It's not that MS hasn't had the ability to run on ARM, it's just that until recently ARM wasn't seen as a suitable chip for a desktop-style OS. CE powers lots of handheld or embedded devices, from smartphones to RFID scanners, and I suspect most of them run on ARM (CE runs on a few other architectures too, but ARM has dominated that market for a while).

  Now that there's a demand for more "serious" operating systems on ARM, they're porting NT (a much more capable kernel than CE) over to it. Have ported, in fact, apparently. Interestingly, they've also apparently also already ported the Javascript JIT compiler; I'm pretty sure you can't get the performance shown in the video out of a 1 GHz chip interpreting JS.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

CLR/.Net stuff should run fine I imagine. Also, I remember Alpha had FX32! which would run x86 code at decent speeds using static recompilation and that was many years ago now.

Real Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

ARM is puny, x86 is strong. x86 can emulate ARM (see iOS and Android dev environments) but there is no way ARM is going to emulate x86 apps at a usable speed.

Holy cow, Batman! How much more backward can you understand the problem?

The reason x86 can emulate ARM is because ARM is *simple by design*. ARM cannot emulate x86 at decent speeds because x86 is a *pile of crap* from 30 years ago with legacy bullshit bolted on top of each new generation.

Re:Real Reality Check

[jmorris42]

> The reason x86 can emulate ARM is because ARM is *simple by design*

Which is only a nicer way of saying RISC. Bottom line is you need more cycles to get the same work done and the fastest ARM chips clock slower than the slowest x86 chips. ARM products that play music and video for example, always offload that sort of compute intensive work because pure software decoding is pitiful. Yes, I own a Nokia N770. Where ARM totally owns Intel is power consumption, both idle power and computing work per unit of power.

Now try emulating a puny 1.6Ghz Atom on a 1Ghz ARM and see how well that goes. Even if you have one of the new dual core ARMs you don't have anywhere near the computing power to make the attempt and if you try you will only succeed in killing the battery, defeating the primary advantage of ARM vs x86.

Re:Real Reality Check

[the linux geek]

A modern x64 core (Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, arguably K10) is not only faster than ARM, but so spectacularly faster that there's really no comparison. Atom - you know, the slow-ass netbook processor - is much faster than the Cortex A9 at the same clock speed, running integer workloads. That's pretty much the most favorable comparison you can get for ARM, and it still loses out badly.

Re:Real Reality Check

[TeknoHog]

The Atom is nice -- I like being able to watch 1080p x264 with a fanless CPU (no GPU decoding). However, this still takes about 10 W including the chipset. ARM CPUs, on the other hand, max out way below one watt, and do not even need heatsinks. This is pretty important in the mobile space. When you look at computational efficienty per watt, ARM is a clean winner, though it does not scale up very well, so this only applies in the low end.

IMHO, ARM processors are already good enough for my "desktop" needs, and for the occasional CPU-heavy work I could use other machines. I'd love to replace the guts in my current Powerbook with an ARM system, since I like to work with a normal keyboard and display, instead of a "mobile" device.

Re:Real Reality Check

[TheRaven64]

Atom manages to get somewhere between 10-50% more performance, clock for clock, at the cost of about a 1000% higher power requirement. With my CPU usage monitor sitting here at 10%, guess which chip looks more attractive for a portable device?

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a reason they bought up an pc emulation company...

The boat has to be somewhere

[BrendaEM]

Strip away 20 Years of hardware boat, but then add the most bloated OS on it.
It doesn't make sense.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[drsmithy]

So I wouldn't doubt they've kept a division of MSR going with an up to date portable version of the NT code base. what I don't see how they can keep from getting bit in the ass on is if they name it Windows people are gonna expect Windows apps to work which of course they most assuredly WON'T, not without a recompile that most companies simply won't do.

There does not (yet, I suppose, but it's hard to see this changing) seem to be much interest in ARM for "non-appliances". People don't expect their OS X apps to run on their iPad, likewise they won't expect some random Windows application to run on whatever tablets/phones/appliances end up running "ARMWin", or whatever it gets called.

Re:holy crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...it generally gets you off if you're the pitcher...

if you are homosexual i guess it has a strong appeal to you. not really any other way to have penetrative sex with a man.

if you are heterosexual ... i don't understand that one. maybe you do not have a real deep intimate emotional and spiritual connection with your partner so that any kind of romance or sex or even just curling up with her and watching a good movie is wonderful and satisfying .. so you're bored and think some kink will make up for the mediocrity of your realtionship.

otherwise, meh, why do you want to do her in the anus when a much nicer more appealing hole is about an inch away that will probably give her more pleasure and less discomfort? i suspect men who really like to have anal sex with women might be latently gay or have some of the tendencies but they don't know it because they are scared of the "fag" label and do not want to explore such a question. call it denial or whatever you like. as a heterosexual i can tell you that lesbians find a certain acceptance where gay men can be repulsive to both men and women, right or wrong that's the reality.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

will IE finally have WebGL?

[HelloKitty]

MSFT, the only ones without WebGL...

Firefox4 has it
Chrome has it
Opera beta has it
Safari beta has it

Re:will IE finally have WebGL?

[TheCeltic]

Nope, it will have "WebDirectX", the proprietary, lock-the-user-into-a-single-platform and closed 3D option... Of course, it is released AFTER WebGL has been out for a while.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone write "Pure .Net apps" though? A serious question, as I can't think of an app that I've written that is pure .Net. I always need to include some pInvoke (Platform Invoke or Windows API calls), which can make code less than portable (depending on memory packing / variable alignment, pointer size, etc.). However, since I write code to help maintain our Windows images and also as utilities for users (not as large applications), perhaps my perception is a bit skewed.

Windows and IE running on ARM? Big deal.

[brokeninside]

Windows of various incarnations and IE has run on many platforms.

Now, show me the latest version of Microsoft Office running on ARM with file compatibility with the x86 version. Then I'll be impressed.

But..

[Surakin]

Shouldn't they finally fix the x86 versions first (?)

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Runaway1956]

Adobe? Why Adobe? Don't they introduce more exploits to a Windows machine than even Microsoft? I know I've read articles in the recent past that say more exploits are using Adobe products as the vector than all other vectors combined. And, you're going to give Adobe some kind of a free pass on the new architecture? Wow - you should be a politician. You certainly have the smarts for it!

.NET

[tepples]

Has Microsoft created a "fat binary" format

No, but Microsoft does have .NET, and it might even have a compatibility layer to run CE apps.

Re:.NET

[jbplou]

.Net is great for portability in the Microsoft ecosystem. However the big problem is COM and ActiveX. Take a look at Office 2010 is a list of features that don't work on the 64 bit mode. MS even recommends you install Office 32bit on AM64 systems because of this.

Migrating non-.Net corporate applications from 32XP to 32Win 7 is very difficult. I can't wait for Windows 8 so we can deal with x86, AM64, and ARM Windows all with their own incompatibilities. On the server Windows is easy because they are moving to all AM64 but on the client it will be a nightmare.

Re:.NET

[yuhong]

Migrating non-.Net corporate applications from 32XP to 32Win 7 is very difficult.

No it is not. There are some issues but it is not that difficult.

Re:.NET

[jbplou]

Depends on the code base...

Re:.NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather it depends on the developers to have followed the published security guidelines that Microsoft has been setting forth as good practices and Windows Logo requirements for almost two decades. The vast, vast majority of applications that run just peachy on Windows XP but fail on Windows Vista/7 are those that assume that they are running as a local admin. They write files to %ProgramFiles% or they write registry keys to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or do something similarly incorrect. They do things that would be unfathomable in a UNIX environment, and continued to do so despite the fact that under a Windows NT domain the default user security context is about as locked down as it is on Vista/7 by default now. It was just too easy to ignore the rules and say, "oh just give them local admin, what's the worst they could do?"

I've been involved with updating applications that violate those rules so that they run correctly on domains since before Windows 2000 came out. Any and all of those applications, which run correctly under a domain standard user account, also runs perfectly fine on Vista or 7 with no modifications whatsoever.

Re:.NET

[Anonymous Coward]

ActiveX is like a virus. Migrating to another architecture is the only way to get rid of it.. =)

Re:.NET

[man_of_mr_e]

Few .NET apps use COM or ActiveX. Well, that's not quite true, but the majority fo COM use is for OS based components (like COM+ stuff, MTS, etc..). Those would likely exist in a ported OS as well. Most third party controls for .NET apps are pure .net code, or at most using p/invoke to OS API's which would work just fine on a ported OS because those API's are still there).

What's more, there's been a lot of progress in native code "translation", which basically recompiles the application from binary to new binary before it's run. It takes a few minutes the first time it's run, then it runs at native speed (or at worse a little less because it may have simulate complex instructions with several RISC instructions).

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows can't open OOXML documents. Office can. That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish, they had big problems getting Office for Mac from PowerPC to x86, and reportedly the Office for Windows codebase is even older and more convoluted. It'll be hard if not impossible to port to ARM.

          The big problem, Windows will be at a big big disadvantage, and in fact I don't thik it'll be competitive:

          1) It's bloated and poor-performing when compared to most Linux distros, or MacOS for that matter. ARM systems tend to me "small" (low processor speed, low RAM, etc.)

            2) Applications. This is really Windows main (IMHO sole) strength, on ARM it is gone! You use Ubuntu, and you have a full set of NATIVE applications on ARM just as on x86*. You use Windows, you'll either have almost no applications (if it doesn't emulate x86), or you'll have all these apps that run at a fraction of native speed. Microsoft *had* NT running on HP PA-RISC, Dec Alpha, PowerPC, and perhaps one or two other platforms. The absolute lack of apps did the in (Alpha used an x86 emulator however.) There was Windows for Itanium, again no apps (it was really stripped, though, couldn't even print.)

---------------------
*Side note, i almost got into collecting some "exotic" computers, but after we installed Linux onto several, they were so indstinguishable from the regular PC experience I figured it wasn't worth it even if I could get them at a good price. I put Linux onto a DEC Alpha about 5 years ago, it was so similar to an x86 desktop that I would not have been able to tell it was an Alpha without looking at the case (which was a PC-like Case but said "Alpha" on it.) As a prank, my workmates switched my x86 Ubuntu desktop out for a PowerMac with Ubuntu, moved it into the same case, and got USB->PS2 adapters so my model M keyboard and all was plugged in, and put my home directory etc. back onto that. Seriously, I didn't notice it was a Mac until I rebooted and heard the Mac startup sound. We installed some distro on a PA-RISC, again it was indistinguishable from a x86 desktop. With a ARM based system you will not be disappointed with an ARM distro.

Perfect platform for a demo

[gmuslera]

They could test it in the N900, everyone does that. Extra points if they manage to run it in maemo. Also they will show how tied are with Nokia that way.

Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promises?

[dpbsmith]

Windows NT was originally positioned as a portable, platform-neutral system and Microsoft made a big deal of it not being just limited to Intel architecture but also running on ACE platforms (remember ACE?), MIPS, Digital Alpha, and at least one other whose name escapes me. IBM PowerPC maybe?

Microsoft seduced and abandoned companies that committed to Windows on non-Intel platforms, with the abandonment beginning almost as soon as the seduction was complete. My employer made a significant commitment to Windows-on-DEC-Alpha--at that time, their specific application benchmarked over twice as fast on Alpha as on Intel. It was NT 3.51, IIRC, and Microsoft moved up to Windows 4.0 on Intel and kept dragging feet and making excuses on Alpha, finally acknowledging that it was not going to be supported. At that point, the Alpha systems bought by my employer's customers were barely a year old, and those customers were not happy with us for selling them such rapidly orphaned products.

What matters is not whether Windows can run on ARM, but whether Microsoft actually has any serious or durable commitment to supporting it on that platform.

Did I miss something?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, Windows has run on a lot of processors for many years. Why is everyone acting like this is a big shocker? Maybe if some of you lemmings would get your heads out of the Windows == Windows 98 way of thinking you'd not sound so amazingly stupid to those of us who've actually worked with Microsoft software that isn't over 12 years old.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn young'uns, making us feel old, I must be really ancient, I remember Windows NT 4.0 supporting Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS chips. When was that, 1996?

So funny

[Fattysc]

Linux dick riders ftw!

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[NJRoadfan]

Windows NT had the same problem with PPC. It wouldn't actually run on a PPC Mac even though it was the most common machine out there.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Creepy]

IE running on Windows is about as exciting as grass growing in dirt - it works, but it is not exactly novel. As you said, Windows NT was designed on architecture independence. In fact, Windows itself is even endian independent, but it still reads and writes files in the native endian-ness (or so I remember from Alpha-NT). With ARM endian-ness is not a problem because ARM is bi-endian, so they can just use little-endian and be happy. If IE only uses the Windows API and the Windows API only uses a kernel built for the hardware, it should compile and run without any changes (because the Windows API is essentially a hardware abstraction layer with the kernel being hardware dependent).

Generally with this sort of design, the API itself is architecture independent (in this case, C++) code and hardware dependent pieces such as graphics, I/O, and devices are part of the kernel. Apple has pretty much the same thing in architecture independent Objective-C code on top of a hacked Mach microkernel (aka monolithic kernel based on mach) which they used to transition from PowerPC to Intel.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[devincook]

Adobe? Why Adobe? Don't they introduce more exploits to a Windows machine than even Microsoft?

AC probably only mentioned Adobe because of the prevalence of Flash... the end users certainly don't care that all the code Adobe writes is full of holes. If they did, they wouldn't keep using it. Obviously the risk is worth the reward of getting to watch youtube videos and play flash games...

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[evilviper]

Your memory is suspect... NT 4.0 had Alpha support at launch. It was even in Windows 2000 RCs, and only dropped come release time, though I do recall Compaq selling Alpha servers with 2000 despite that.

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Anonymous Coward]

What matters is not whether Windows can run on ARM, but whether Microsoft actually has any serious or durable commitment to supporting it on that platform.

They have gone "all in." I wish I could explain further, but I can't. It's really making life suck for MS IHV partners right now. But yes, the commitment is serious and it is throwing many companies for a loop at the moment.

Windows is no longer relevant

[QuietLagoon]

The more that Microsoft tries to squeeze the square Windows peg into the round hole of current and future computing needs, the more ugly splinters that will be flying and injuring the innocent bystanders. Microsoft needs to wake up and smell the non-Windows world. Until it does, it will never be able to compete. What else is there to say?

Re:Windows is no longer relevant

[toygeek]

It doesn't need to smell the non-windows world because it currently dominates the market of the windows world which if you look around dominates the scenery. I really like Linux, ran it for a number of years in both server and desktop environs and yet I must admit I really like Windows 7. MS is doing a pretty decent job of things these days and sure they're a little late for the ARM party but who cares? Does it matter?

Additionally, Apple was about 20 years late for the x86 party and yet they switched over to Intel processors without too much trouble. They had the x86 version running quite a while before it was even mentioned that they were moving to Intel processors.

The real concern here is the huge market segregation between IOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry etc. Reminds me of the Commodore 64, Apple II, Tandy, IBM, days.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, that's exactly what Microsoft is doing now with Windows Phone 7. Adobe is going to get unhindered native access for Flash. Performance trumps security, apparently.

Microsoft never cares about security while it puts compatibility at risk. Which is why Microsoft still bundles a ring 0 driver made by Macrovision, previously susceptible to escalation attacks, in all copies of Windows 7.

It's the early 90's all over again...

[PinchDuck]

Windows had been ported to the DEC Alpha, and was going to be running on mainframes, MIPS, and SPARC soon after.
How is this any different?
Yawn.

x86 next?

[ChucktheMan]

Maybe they can get it running on X86, instead of being the poster child for the three finger salute.

Re:x86 next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Three-finger salute? You mean logging in? Oh, right, you haven't actually used Windows in a decade, so clearly it must function exactly as it did then.

I get it. and I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is making hushed strides towards bringing their Windows-centric world ("experience" ?) beyond the desktop and laptop. Following the news, we go from rumor and speculation about "strategy" ... to actual demonstrations in surprisingly short amount of time, and from what I can tell, for the industry all these accomplishments are somewhat ... unexpected. I am astounded by the rate of development over there. Even FTA, ... it's "sneaky".

You know what else is sneaky? Letting their mobile dev "research" team, rather than product team, release products. It makes MS direction seem even more splintered, undirected, unfocused. It also tantalizes us with glimpse into the potential at redmond. Say, who else used to do that sneaky strategy? Oh yea, Google. Popcap. Blizzard, even.

But MS is also under-rated and dismissed easily. No one believes MS can compete; even on Sd the attitude is "they just won't get it working, so what". This scoffing works to their benefit. It means no one will be prepared to counter their tech offerings once they drop the bomb. See, they're poised to take over the mobile arena, but b/c their "sneakiness" no one can really see a cohesive strategy or capability to do anything so far. But when Intel scoffs at MS interest in low-power mobile architectures, and then suddenly Intel makes it a major focus to provide *just* what MS is doing with ARM, without clear partnered agenda, well... you know something big is going to happen. You know MS will be on a lot of devices, and you know it's gonna be Windows.

But see what MS is doing here? They're steadily, stealthily extending their reach into the non-PC market. Targeting computing architectures, with a philosophy that WILL set them apart... Our mobile devices are handheld-PC's, and truly only MS is equipped to treat them as such. And MS is, And MS will. And we will all be better off for it.

The only error MS can really make along this path is to focus way too heavily on touch-screen based drill-down UI. Anyone who uses the iPod or touchscreen-only Android knows the pain it is to use "layered UI" apps simultaneously (i.e. going 3 levels deep into an app to uncover a functionality, then having to switch to another app or to expose other functionality elsewhere, it's hard to do). Zune interface is NOT the way to go. MS messes up the UI means of exposure to functional control elements, and it will lose big time.

Re:I get it. and I like it.

[miffo.swe]

Steadily, stealthy? They've been screaming and ranting about it for a decade but has so far gotten nowhere despite numerous attempts. Their only advantage over other platforms are their win32 API and all the applications written for it. Take that away and you have a failed MS product.

If Win8 on ARM lacks full support for win32 its dead on arrival. That backwards compability is what makes the whole project next to impossible. The biggest error Microsoft can do is to scrap their only advantage over other platforms, the applications barrier. At the same time, thats the single most difficult issue to solve.

but is it safe?

[the simurgh]

yes but is it secure? no???? what's that you can't make a secure os? then why are you in the business of making an os? your using the tears of frustrated users who have had serious problems with your os to achieve immortality? WHAT WHAT!?!

Re:And Intel is making Android work on Atom

[jbplou]

Big deal Atom is just x86 plenty of other OSs run on the architecture other Linux's, BSDs, Solaris, etc...

Don't forget Oak Trail

[yuhong]

Intel has just launched Oak Trail, which is the name for the combination of Atom Z600 and SM35 PCH. In particular, the SM35 PCH provides compatibility with the main IBM PC compatible x86 platform with all the legacy, so it can run any standard x86 OS, but it is still low-power ("Put together, Oak Trail's Atom Z620 processor and SM35 Express hub have a thermal envelope of just 3.75W."):
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20753

Re:Don't forget Oak Trail

[jmorris42]

> Oak Trail's Atom Z620 processor and SM35 Express hub have a thermal envelope of just 3.75W.

Which isn't in the ball park yet. Look at a typical tablet. A large battery in one has about ~25W/Hr. That would get you a pretty decent six hours.... if you didn't have to worry about misc crap like radios and displays. Oops. And it is notable that they aren't bragging about solving the idle power consumption problem of x86.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[man_ls]

If it looks the same and is called the same, people are going to expect it to behave the same. But I suspect this will be handled like the Apple transition from POWER to Intel chips - fat binaries for new apps, the Common Language Runtime and other runtimes ported to ARM, and an emulation layer (probably based on VirtualPC) to handle stuff that really can't be easily handled any other way such as legacy apps.

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Anonymous Coward]

What is ACE? Surely you are thinking of CHRP, IBM's Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which was actually used for the 90s Macintosh clones, and IBM's own line of (mostly) Windows NT and AIX compatable RS/6000 desktop machines.

NT 4.0 and 3.5 supported x86, MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha. I've ran NT 4 on all of them, and it works just fine. Windows has never had a "fat binary" feature, as far as I know, but the Windows executable format should be able to support such a feature if needed. In addition, CLR-based languages can run on any architecture as-is.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[517714]

Flash is cash. Seriously, if Microsoft wants to beat Android and iOS this is the one place they have a content advantage. They can both capitalize on the existing websites that use Flash and slow the transition to alternatives. If Windows makes applications run in a proper sandbox, exploits should not be a huge problem.

Hypothetical

[hahn]

Let's say MS somehow manages to come out with a tablet version of Windows that CAN be installed and run on an iPad. In fact, let's say they design it specifically to do so. What's the legal consequence of this? Can Apple actually declare it's illegal to install a different OS on their hardware? And if so, would they actually do so? Perhaps this is part of MS's strategy. If they can't supplant iOS on the iPad, they make Apple look oppressive (see Sony vs Geohot). Win-win for Microsoft.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[ZosX]

Actually arm is standardized across versions. So arm v6 code will run on any arm v6 processor in theory. How do you think android handles native code?

There may be more to this than is obvious

[Calibax]

There are a whole lot of comments here about running Windows on phones and tablets built around the ARM architecture. However, that may not be the only reason Microsoft is porting Windows to ARM.

nVidia has announced they are developing a high performance 64-bit processor based on the ARM architecture. They claim is will be used for personal computers and servers, and scale up to supercomputers. They also claim there will be versions with integrated nVidia graphics also.

Now, announcing a product that revolutionary and actually delivering it are very different beasts. If nVidia actually manage to pull it off, I don't think that Microsoft would be happy if the new processors could only run Linux.

Re:There may be more to this than is obvious

[Rockoon]

Remember that nVidia is going head-to-head in the portable space with AMD/ATI and those folks have just released "Bobcat", which is surely going to push nVidia right out of the netbook market. nVidia had been doing OK in this market by offering cost-competitive GPU's but that is no longer possible for portables based on AMD processors, and the situation is very serious because AMD's APU solution also beats the pants off of Intels Atom chips.

For mobile/portable nVidia only has an ARM market now, and there isnt anything nVidia can do about it even if they had the best damn GPU's in the world.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[exomondo]

Windows can't open OOXML documents. Office can. That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish, they had big problems getting Office for Mac from PowerPC to x86, and reportedly the Office for Windows codebase is even older and more convoluted. It'll be hard if not impossible to port to ARM.

They already have office mobile running on ARM that can open ooxml documents.

Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

So... I will surprise everybody.

WIN8 running very very well already on ARM processors.

They rebooted WIN8 to the originally planned WIN7 micro kernel.

Win8 is a one microkernel with multiple interfaces to be booted up within 3sec.
1. It can be traditional PC
2. CAN be Tablet
3. Can be WInphone (Bye bye WInphone 7... if you didn’t realize it was/is just a research and UI project)
4. It runs inside TVs (Hello Samsung!)
5. Runs in the cloud.
6. It is the embedded.

The same Win8.

The Winphone 7 software delivery packaging implemented and further enhanced for consistent solution delivery.
One development toolkit to develop solution across all platforms.

You think it is not true. You don't believe that MS can pull this off. They already did it!!! Just they have learnt from Apple. SILENCE! You will be shocked.
People talking about the backward comp ability as an issue. This is NOT a problem anymore because of what MS done in the virtualization.
The virtualization is part of the kernel and can natively virtualize anything to achieve backward compability.

Have you ever thought what this Really really means? You should have goose bumps...

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[JamesP]

Yawn

Microsoft always "promises", rarely delivers

For MS to do that a spark of good sense must have passed through Ballmer's mind. Very unlikely

Too bad (or great) they keep burning themselves with half-assed attempts (like Zune, WP7 etc)

If it's like you're telling, Win 8 sounds like Vista^2

Really, Microsoft got the most inept, idiot, unexperienced people to work on Networking for Vista (both the stack and the management interface).

I'm guessing Win 8 will be similar, even if it has a new kernel (which sounds great)

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[arndawg]

So... I will surprise everybody.

WIN8 running very very well already on ARM processors.

They rebooted WIN8 to the originally planned WIN7 micro kernel.

Win8 is a one microkernel with multiple interfaces to be booted up within 3sec. 1. It can be traditional PC 2. CAN be Tablet 3. Can be WInphone (Bye bye WInphone 7... if you didn’t realize it was/is just a research and UI project) 4. It runs inside TVs (Hello Samsung!) 5. Runs in the cloud. 6. It is the embedded.

The same Win8.

The Winphone 7 software delivery packaging implemented and further enhanced for consistent solution delivery. One development toolkit to develop solution across all platforms.

You think it is not true. You don't believe that MS can pull this off. They already did it!!! Just they have learnt from Apple. SILENCE! You will be shocked. People talking about the backward comp ability as an issue. This is NOT a problem anymore because of what MS done in the virtualization. The virtualization is part of the kernel and can natively virtualize anything to achieve backward compability.

Have you ever thought what this Really really means? You should have goose bumps...

That windows is linux? Wat!?

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

So far the advertisement now just deliver it. Releasing something this new without a large scale usertest is bound to be bugridden and a bad entry in this market.

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll believe it when I see it. This is just the usual MS fanboy wet dream bull. It was a lot easier to pull off this kind of fantasy back in the 90's when they weren't completely impotent.

But now they are, and quite frankly people are sick of windows and don't want that garbage on their Phone, Tablet or TV. MS already tried and failed miserably for a decade+ on those fronts.

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it make me pizza?

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

"You should have goose bumps..."

No, more like hives ...

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention WinFS....

Re:Suprise... and Microsoft will suprise everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah? Windows 7 already boots in second if you're running off solid state. How is anything you just listed a "surprise"?

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[rubies]

I'm not sure "seduced and abandoned" really captures the flavour of those heady days. From what I can recall, most of the companies involved were fighting fires on three fronts: their old-line proprietary businesses were getting chopped to bits by PC's and the war of attrition that was Unix at the time - the company I worked for had internal in-fighting as the unix and PC business started to threaten the old mid-range server business and competition BETWEEN companies was even more cut-throat. Sun was playing everyone for suckers as the Unix wars played out. Microsoft offered a plausible, one size fits all solution that looked like a complete end-run around Sun. Digital, in particular, the company with most to lose (vax, ultrix, a dead line of PCs that started with the wacky rainbow and ended up with them buying white boxes or 3rd party contracting out that part of big govt contracts) signed up big time. In fact the relief was palpable in their office nearby when the sales guys suddenly had a story to tell other than obvious loser products like OSF.

That NT never took off on anything other than Intel wasn't really Microsofts fault - in fact to think they orchestrated some Machiavellian plot to sucker a bunch of lucrative partners into mercy killing their businesses doesn't match what happened. What happened is that the customers woke up to proprietary hardware.

In a lot of ways, Sun looked like "the good guy" for 15 years but they really were kind of evil by currying discontent amongst the other Unix vendors (and even their own partners like Novell). Microsoft were the main beneficiary of Sun deciding to try to monopolise the Unix market which inadvertently made Windows a player beyond the desktop.

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Locutus]

and just maybe that was their plan all along since it helped eliminate yet another competitor to the WinTel duopoly and solidified both in the industry for far too long. Remember, they planned a nice game with getting apps ported from UNIX to Win32 and played the bait/switch on them too. Gave out lots of licenses for Win32U, got lots of UNIX software vendors to port claiming they would have one code base and be able to support both platforms. But once they got a significant number of core UNIX apps ported to Win32, they yanked the rug out from under the Win32U companies by massively increasing the licensing costs so that none of them, but one, could stay in business. The one(MainSoft?) could because Microsoft also was paying them for 'porting Internet Explorer to Solaris and HPUX'. Nicely hedging their bet on ending up in court.

The company is made up of bastards who would probably plan your first child's funeral to make sure Windows keeps its position. And I'm also reminded of how they assigned a dozen Microsoft employees( some psychologists ) to script and lead a magazine article author to the specific way they wanted the article to be written. Even down to scripting question/responses to be used when various calls from the author were made to various Microsoft people.

This Windows on ARM is going to get as much or more of the same kind of attention. Microsoft's future could ride on this. IMO

LoB

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft needs ARM, not the other way round. So Microsoft releasing on ARM then abandoning it is a who cares moment. It's all about MS staying relevant, not ARM.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why Microsoft still bundles a ring 0 driver made by Macrovision, previously susceptible to escalation attacks, in all copies of Windows 7.

oh no! Better get on the horn to apple and tell them to stop bundling the 'previously susceptible' safari that could allow the core OS to be modified in all copies of iOS. retard.

This begs to question

[Billly Gates]

What does this mean for Windows 8 mobile?

WindowsCE was a joke. MaximumPC called it a "Hey we have all this old Windows 3.11 code we do not know what to do with since NT/Windows 95 came along ... hmm I know ...".

My guess is since Andriod and Ios are much more powerful and related to their native bases of Gnu/Linux and MacOSX that Microsoft is going to base Windows 8 mobile on Windows 8 desktop.

Since directX, DNA, and other cool technologies are only available on the desktop make Windows mobile 7 and 6.5 very very far behind.

Obviously Microsoft is not going to release their desktop version of Windows 8 on an arm. BestBuy and Joe Six packs trying to get office to work would have a fit.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Sir_Sri]

Notice that MS did a pretty decent job with binary translation from the xbox to the xbox2, and that was much lower priority (in fact it was primarily written by one guy afaik, he gives talks fairly regularly). Damned if I can remember his name at the moment. But that's not all that relevant. Enough money might produce a half decent solution for windows. Also, all that code that's in windows they've had to figure out how to move to ARM, and windows is (for better or worse) a lot more than just a process scheduler and minimalist front end and API.

It's also not clear what they're targeting windows on ARM for. Desktops? Tablets? Phones? Are they going to a unified OS for all of the above? Pretty much every piece of software has requirements, if the goal is a limited subset of those markets they might do fine killing off compatibility with a lot of apps as long as it will do web browsing, office and a few other things, especially new programs compiled for whatever new market they're working on. I wouldn't be surprised if you could boil down 85 or 90% of non gaming computer use to a dozen application suites or so (office, web browsing, pdf reading, some sort of music app, e-mail, and video watching). Most of those apps are updated on a fairly regular basis so recompiling for ARM might not be a big deal, and unless you're going for a full on desktop replacement at full speed you might be able to manage. Computers are sufficiently more powerful in hardware than most applications require that even relatively inefficient implements might manage.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[AvitarX]

Wouldn't that be good for MS though?

It should still run on Windows 8 ARM (as they can control how the API works), but not on Mono?

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Bing Tsher E]

Windows NT ran on the cross-platform PowerPC Reference Platform, or PREP. So it ran well on various IBM Power PC boxes. Apple at that time was still dancing their proprietary dance. Some of the Mac clones were more hopeful.

I ran Windows NT 4.0 on an IBM PowerPC box. But it was an exercise in 'just because.' There were zero third party apps for it. It made a nice solitare desktop box, or you could use it as a Server.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[pclminion]

I think you missed the point. The ISA (instruction set architecture) may be standardized (even then, there are dozens of variants), but you don't even really have an idea what sort of bus you're going to be sitting on, let alone anything else. On an x86 system you know you've got a north bridge, a south bridge, a particular type of PIC, a certain kind of timer, PCI, etc. While you could certainly build a computer based on an x86 that is completely unlike that, it would be an oddball. On ARM systems, no, pretty much anything that isn't an industry x86 architecture, it's just total chaos.

Microsoft will end up specifying a particular reference platform. Those of us who have NDAs with MS will get the details in the next little while. I even know which variant of ARM is going to be used, though of course I can't say what that is right now.

Next steps for MS

[pixline]

Ok: you got ARM, and you're trying to build a decent web browser. What about a decent POSIX subsystem in Windows next? Windows is the only major environment who can't run a simple bash script, this is so 90's! Given that MS survived the OS wars at ease wouldn't be hard to give a *standard* tool to Win people....

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Austerity Empowers]

Flash would still need to be recompiled for a new platform, this will probably take Adobe until 2025 at their current rate, even assuming the API calls remain constant.

Pre-Vista .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Between XP and Vista it was alleged that Microsoft had been preparing a .NET CLR based operating system to be released around 2004. For some reason(s) it was never made to work, or at least was not working by early 2005. This meant that it was necessary to get something out the door in a hurry. Server 2003 Kernel plus latest GUI stuff was put together and released as Vista. It seemed rushed, it was.

Perhaps this Windows 8 is the result of continuing the work abandoned prior to Vista.

Or perhaps it is the old MS trick of VapourWare : announce something is coming 'real soon now' in the hope that everyone stops buying competitor's products so that they can see what MS's are. This worked many times in the past, and competitors went bust while customers waited, and waited, for MS to deliver.

Resistence Is Futile, You Will Be Assimilated

[itsybitsy]

Resistance is Futile: Surrender now. You will service us. You will pay the Windows Tax. Our Arm Will Reach You. Resistance is Futile. We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own and dumb it down to the lowest cheapest junk tek. Resistance is Futile.
http://youtu.be/mVg5VxPdK80

Re:Resistence Is Futile, You Will Be Assimilated

[Anonymous Coward]

Just copy paste the actual youtube link you fucking moron. youtu.be is squatter owned and no one with any sense clicks on shortened links. ctrl-c, ctrl-v. Not that difficult.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[CAIMLAS]

I think we'll be surprised how many Windows apps will run on Windows 8 with just a recompile - or for that matter, just running through the .NET CLR. MS appeared to be pushing this way, one way or another, since the "Microsoft Java" days for application development, and their programming frameworks improving significantly along the way... it's not MSVC++6 anymore...

On the phone, I think the value Windows will provide will be:

* Real Outlook
* OneNote
* Modern security models
* More mature kernel with proper memory protection, etc.
* Adaptability/utility to the person who actually wants to use the device

Basically, it'll be what Windows Mobile should've been 5 years ago, and what Windows Phone isn't. At least, that's my theory.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari doesn't have complete control over the operating system and it wasn't written by the most incompetent and malicious company known. Macrovision has BSODed more PCs than Microsoft, and destroyed more burners and corrupted more hard drives than anyone.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because Adobe hasn't ported Flash to ARM for Android or anything silly like that.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[smash]

If you're writing code tied to a particular hardware problem in 2000 or later, you deserve whatever fail you get. Microsoft aren't stupid and will be writing hardware portable code.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[smash]

uh... by hardware problem i meant "hardware platform". problems on the brain @ work....

Isnt this just Windows CE7?

[miffo.swe]

I have a strong suspicion this is really just IE10 running on Windows CE7. The road towards bringing Windows 8 onto ARM is a very long and hard path, unless all backwards compability is tossed out the window.

It actually seems like Windows 8 will be atleast two different platforms with one or two common development enviroments. One separate platform for ARM and a fundamentally different one for x64, and another beast for WP7 phones that shares some similarities with the ARM version.

As always when it comes to Microsoft much water will run under the bridges and many features will be scrapped before we see the real products so its not much use speculating yet.

Re:Isnt this just Windows CE7?

[shutdown -p now]

What the hell is "Windows CE 7", and why do you believe that, whatever it is, it has window decorations like that of Win7?

Re:Isnt this just Windows CE7?

[miffo.swe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_Compact_7

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

and you point out a carefully constructed view. The UI differences - multitouch and cocoa touch thereby being an example - have made the consumer extremely aware that apps written for one platform just make no sense on the other! With windows having, from a UI sense, much less differentiation (and mean wince 6.5 and previous) between phone and desktop, they could not craft the same expectation that a windows app should be "hard" to make work on a portable device. In this case, multitouch has become the valhalla by which OSX application developers can get the the average person to happily buy the same code twice Whether I like it or not.. windows would wise to "invent" a UI that has a basic divide from their mainstream offering. Is that their current offering? Maybe.. but I personally have no clue (*as a savvy developer*) what the hell all those boxes on the screen are other then some art students' thesis....

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you are telling me is that ARM devices are like old-timer unix boxen, where hardware is kinda computery, but not computery like (any) of those other guys. Thats what made the unix boxen such a pain: non-standard parts (even my old Amiga, which had more in common to unix boxen than a pc, particularly the OS, had non-standard components which made it a PITA). I remember 7 pin serial connectors. 9 pin you say? NO! Almost the same, but 2 less, just so a 9 pin wouldn't fit and you had to buy their pricey one. Or the 880k disk drive. 720k you say? No, 880 (although 720 diskettes would work, you just have to buy on the more quality end, and format the disk yourself, even if they claim its pre-formatted, they don't mean for you. I remember other unix hardware (non-Amiga), where the hardware was non-standard (almost like the memory on a PS3), with ram that only fits 'their' box, monitors that are highly non-standard and not necessarily better. There were some with kewel features, like SunOS/Solaris boxen that could be 'jumpstarted': you keep an OS image somewhere on the network, connect the new box to the network, give the architecture type (cpu) and MAC address of the box, and it formats drives, and dumps in an OS remotely.

Oh give it a rest

[Sycraft-fu]

"Seduced and abandoned?" Not hardly. MS makes their OS for the processors it feels there is a market for. In the NT days, they decided to try it on some other platforms, since it was portable. Problem was hardly anyone was buying. Yes, yes your employer got on board, well one company is not enough to make a market for this kind of thing.

You are also incorrect about support, NT 4.0 supported Alpha, MIPS, PPC, and x86. With Windows 2000 they were dropping support for MIPS and PPC due to massive lack of interest, but initially planning on keeping Alpha support. You could get it in beta. However, Compaq announced they were dropping Windows on Alpha, so MS dropped it with RC1, since that was the last major vendor that gave a shit.

That means they supported Alpha versions of Windows NT from July 1993 (Windows NT 3.1) to June of 2004 (the date they stopped support for NT4) and they were releasing new updates for the OS until November 1999 (SP6's release date). That is not an insignificant timeline. They didn't exactly role it out and kill it a year later.

The thing is Alpha was dying by the end of 1999, when Windows 2000 was launched. Like I said, Compaq stopped supporting Windows on Alpha (and they owned DEC at that point). In 2001 they sold Alpha to Intel, killing all development for it.

So either you are pissed off because you made a bad decision, and got bitten for it (if it got orphaned in one year, you were selling your products in 2003, which means Alpha had been officially dead for two years) or you are just making stuff up because you dislike MS (given that your statements do not fit the facts).

So, what'll happen with Windows on ARM (presuming they release it, could be just a test or for embedded applications)? Well that'll depend on the market. If there is strong demand, they'll keep making it. If nobody wants it'll they'll phase it out.

Same shit with IA-64. MS supported that in Windows 2000 Server, and has continued support for it with Windows 2008R2. However demand has been declining, so they've said 2008R2 will be the last Itanium version unless anything changes. They didn't support it for one version and drop it, they supported it as long as there was demand, and if demand picks up again, so can support. It also isn't like they make it a surprise. They've announced support is stopping, however 2008R2 will be supported at least until 7/10/2018 (that is their guaranteed date for support, they can extend it). So it isn't like there isn't some time to make a change.

Just a note

[Sycraft-fu]

Windows 8 may not have x86 compatibility. MS has stated they wish to end x86 support after Windows 7 and indeed Server 2008R2 (the server version of 7 more or less) does not have x86 support. Now this remains to be seen, if there are too many current x86 devices (like Netbooks) then they may continue support, but their stated goal is to drop it and go x64 only.

Re:Just a note

[jrumney]

I wondered about that, and almost put a question mark after the x86.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[julesh]

Does anyone write "Pure .Net apps" though? A serious question, as I can't think of an app that I've written that is pure .Net. I always need to include some pInvoke (Platform Invoke or Windows API calls), which can make code less than portable (depending on memory packing / variable alignment, pointer size, etc.). However, since I write code to help maintain our Windows images and also as utilities for users (not as large applications), perhaps my perception is a bit skewed.

I need to use p/invoke in about half of my projects, usually to shell functions (e.g. requesting information about explorer shell items, building context menus, and the like). That's necessary for seemless integration with the desktop. But I suspect p/invoke to windows api functions will still work, it's only p/invoke to a custom dll or using a non-MS COM object/activex control that is likely to fail, so we should both be in the clear...

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

You're dead wrong. .NET is almost dead except for enterprise web stuff like Java. Silverlight is being eviscerated as I write this. You can already see it in press releases and white papers if you read between the lines, but

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[jimicus]

Thing is, emulation introduces a huge overhead. You really don't want to do it unless the architecture you're emulating is several times slower than the host architecture you're emulating it on.

That's not the case with emulating x86 on ARM.

I think the purpose is less to do with "let's run Windows everywhere" and more to do with "this way we only need to maintain one OS and maybe a different shell for tablet devices. With the added bonus that we can still take advantage of the Windows name as a marketing tool".

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[petermgreen]

Windows people are gonna expect Windows apps to work which of course they most assuredly WON'T, not without a recompile that most companies simply won't do.

I'm pretty sure MS can make them run, dynamic recompilation is hardly a new concept.

The question is can they make them run with tolerable performance. Apple got away with using this method to migrate from PPC to x86 but afaict they only got away with it because the x86 boxes were much faster than the PPC boxes they were replacing. ARM boxes tend to be slow in comparison to x86 boxes.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[BasilBrush]

They already maintain the Windows Mobile 7 OS as well. And that has an OS designed for mobile touch screen devices. The most logical thing for Microsoft to do would be to use that for tablets, just as iOS and Android are used on tablets.

The fact that Microsoft aren't doing that means they see some competitive advantage to using WIndows. And it's not to do with maintaining less OSs. It's clearly that they see enterprise users wanting to use their existing Windows software on tablets. Even if that will need a few tweaks and a recompile to do it.

I'm sure they're wrong, as they've been trying to push Windows tablets for more than a decade with no success. But I'm sure they think if they can only get size down and battery life up, they'll succeed.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[smash]

Uh. You don't necessarily even know what buses you have available on PC, either. We've gone through multiple CPU bus designs, multiple expansion bus designs, and PC operating systems have managed to deal with it.

I am glad they know how to

[McTickles]

Cross compile! after all these years the coders at Microsoft are starting to learn to do more than "hello world" on x86.

Soon they'll be able to handle a high school computing course.

I am so proud of them!

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[weicco]

You are right about NT. It was, and still is, good kernel. Back in days it could run on many architectures and had may other nice features.

But IIRC it was Intel that killed other architectures. At least they killed Alpha by incorporating Alpha technology to Pentium. Also IIRC there was some court battle between DEC and Intel which was decided out of court but didn't turn out so good for DEC/Alpha.

Not "equivalent" - instead removes the requirement

[dbIII]

Ah. You again. What he is talking about is a different security model and it's not just about bashing the operating system you use so calm down.
The current model is "allow by default" with a list of bad stuff to look for after it has already got in plus some attempts at finding stuff that is try to get in, but it falls prey to race conditions so stuff still gets infected plus if it's new malware that isn't on the list yet the system gets infected.
Another security model is "deny by default" with a list of the things that are allowed. If it isn't on the list it isn't allowed to run or if it isn't on the list of things allowed to communicate it is not allowed to communicate.
These models are operating system agnostic.
Windows 7 shows a definite shift towards the second model from Microsoft and their server products adopt it to an even greater extent.

To sum up, instead of the virus scanner acting as a bandaid and list of bad stuff you instead have a list of what is allowed so that only the good stuff runs. It's not an "equivalent function". It instead removes the need for a virus scanner.

Done for years

[iplayfast]

They just used wine. :)

Re:holy crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

You really shouldn't confuse your preconceptions and/or lack of experience for reality.

(BTW, I am male/hetero, and I've been with at least one woman who wanted it "back there" -- her idea, not mine -- and yes, she was really a she, and had been born that way.)

as a heterosexual i can tell you that lesbians find a certain acceptance where gay men can be repulsive to both men and women, right or wrong that's the reality.

And that is complete and utter crap. I had a room-mate at Uni who was gay. He got heaps more women to come to our room than I ever did.

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty hard to continue to support an architecture that was in the process of being sold to a company that had no intention of continuing the Alpha line. If you want to blame someone for that then blame DEC or Compaq, MS were between a rock and a hard place.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[squizzar]

You clearly haven't worked with any embedded systems. The PC architecture is well defined and, for the most part, backwards compatible. There's a reason you can still put a windows 95 CD in a machine and it will be able to find the display controller, enumerate the PCI busses etc. It's because much of that stuff is not going to change. Might be because the BIOS or the chipsets provide a static abstraction layer over the underlying system, but it doesn't matter - from a software view everything works the same.

When you get an embedded system what you have is a cpu core (ARM, PPC, whatever) and a whole bunch of other silicon IP on the same chip that provides additional functions. So if you want to get to the PCI bus, you need to know how that's been interfaced. Presumably there's some IP core on the chip somewhere that provides the PCI connectivity, but how do you access it? Is it at a certain memory address, do you need to write some magic control register to enable it, do you even know how it works?

If you want an example - have a look at your linux source. In my arch/x86/config I have two defconfig files, one for x86 and one for x86_64. That's it for every single PC platform out there, laptop, desktop, server, whatever. Now have a look at arch/arm/configs or arch/powerpc/configs. See the difference? Many of those will come associated with platform specific code to support that architecture. That's how Linux does it - you provide the interface between the standard system code and the underlying hardware and everything falls into place, no doubt the Windows port is similar. ARM is a CPU core, not an architecture.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be hard if not impossible to port [Microsoft Office to] ARM.

Why do people keep saying this? Office is written in various high level languages. All they have to do is recompile it. Just like any other applications. Just as they have clearly done for Internet Explorer.

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Shimbo]

What is ACE?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Computing_Environment

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

microsoft have silverlight as a competitor to flash. why would they allow adobe to run flash nativelly on the new windows and/or windows phone then ?

even apple doesn't allow flash (and i don't blame them, flash on mobiles is even buggier and shittier than on desktops) and apple doesn't have anything that competes directly. MSFT does. no i don't see flash on winphone/new windows anytime soon.

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Anonymous Coward]

What actually happened is that to produce Windows NT, Microsoft hired Dave Cutler, the father of VMS, away from DEC. Cutler used much of DEC's patented VMS technology (which he himself invented) in NT, and there was a patent fight that Ken Olsen and Bill Gates settled out of court. In the settlement, Microsoft agreed to make an NT product for the DEC Alpha. They dropped the product the day the VMS patents ran out.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[TheRaven64]

Fortunately Windows will probably be all but dead by then (except for in the business world).

Wow, this future must be really terrified of this future. In related news, there will be almost no professional chefs (except in the restaurant trade).

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[qpqp]

reportedly the Office for Windows codebase is even older

Which reports are that? Office came out for Macs first. Compare i.e. here

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know (nor care) about any of that. The OS knows. It can care. I can use the calls the OS provides.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[JackDW]

Microsoft will end up specifying a particular reference platform. Those of us who have NDAs with MS will get the details in the next little while. I even know which variant of ARM is going to be used, though of course I can't say what that is right now.

Good to hear. ARM has needed this for a long time, and since Google didn't do it for Android, the task falls to Microsoft.

Ironically this reference platform will make Linux on ARM an attractive prospect, unlike the current situation where your kernel has to precisely match the hardware you want to use, which makes everything very difficult for both users and developers.

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, I don't have my Win NT 4 Server CD-ROM handy, but I remember it having the following architectures on the disc: MIPS, PPC, Alpha, and i386. I definitely don't remember seeing ACE.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[TheRaven64]

Thing is, emulation introduces a huge overhead

The thing is, no it doesn't. For one thing, most modern emulators don't emulate everything. A platform like Windows ships with a large number of standard libraries, including things for drawing and even video playback. When you draw a line in a window, 99% of the CPU time is spent computing the pixel intersections, and this is all done in Win32 code. When you draw a character on the screen, you're drawing a set of antialiased bezier curves and compositing them onto a buffer. Pretty processor intensive. However, when you do this in emulated code, only the initial call is emulated - the 99% part is native code.

For really CPU-intensive things, like video decoding, this can be even more pronounced. A Windows app playing back video will typically use DirectShow filters for the decoding. It passes a chunk of data to the filter and gets a decoded frame back (often passing it directly to the display device). In an emulated environment, the decoder filter will likely run on the ARM SoC's DSP, and the emulated code will be woken up periodically to pass it new data. Very little of the application actually runs in the emulator.

For 3D stuff the code is even shipped as bytecode already. nVidia and AMD don't even provide the same instruction set between product generations, let alone between vendors. When you run a 3D application, all of that shader code is already being JIT compiled (by the drivers) for the current target GPU. Doing it for the GPU on an ARM SoC is not a challenging problem.

I've written an article on the challenges Microsoft faces with the ARM port. None of them are insurmountable.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[TheRaven64]

Apple got away with using this method to migrate from PPC to x86 but afaict they only got away with it because the x86 boxes were much faster than the PPC boxes they were replacing.

Running Rosetta apps on my Core 2 Duo, the CPU load is almost never above 20%. Most applications just aren't that processor intensive. The one time I noticed a high CPU load was VLC, which struggled a bit playing back HD video - it took me a few months to realise that I was using a PowerPC binary, not a universal binary, so it was running emulated.

And it's worth remembering that Apple didn't create Rosetta. The licensed it from Transitive Technologies (a spin out from Manchester University), who also license the same technology to big UNIX vendors (e.g. to IBM, so they can say 'switch from your old SPARC system to a shiny new POWER system and you can still run all of your old binary-only applications'). That same technology is available for Microsoft to license, if they want to (although they already have a nice x86 emulator in-house, since they bought the company that produced VirtualPC, which emulated an x86 PC on PowerPC Macs).

Closed code and arhitecture independence don't mix

[GameboyRMH]

Closed source code will always be dependent on a fixed architecture. It just isn't practical otherwise. The only way to make it practical is virtualization, and it would have to be at the hardware/firmware level to allow these ARM chips to run an x86 OS and all the apps on top of it, and then you have to take the performance hit of basically running everything inside an emulator.

Can you imagine every single Windows app and driver needing to be released with a version for each architecture? What a nightmare that would be.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[kiwix]

Pure .NET apps should work though, which will assist Microsoft in eliminating non-managed languages.

They should also works on other OSes with mono.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, except you need a different version of the OS for every platform, which is usually thought to be a bad idea.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Runaway1956]

Adobe only recently ported their trash to AMD64. It's only months ago that I downloaded their pre-release for testing on Linux, then a couple months later I saw another pre-release for Windows. I really don't know what they've done with Mac - are they still stuck with a 32 bit version?

Re:Not "equivalent" - instead removes the requirem

[drsmithy]

To sum up, instead of the virus scanner acting as a bandaid and list of bad stuff you instead have a list of what is allowed so that only the good stuff runs. It's not an "equivalent function". It instead removes the need for a virus scanner.

I think you misunderstand the point of AV software. It's not there to prevent things from running as a part of security policy, it's there to prevent things from running once your security policy has been circumvented.

So long as unmanaged computers exist, AV will always have its place because there are always going to be people prepared to "run this to see b00bies".

Incidentally, there's not really anything different about Windows' 7 security model as opposed to earlier versions of NT, all the way back to the 3.1. UAC is almost entirely a matter of user interface improvement.

Re:holy crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

I put it to you that if he was gay and you were straight that you were both doing it wrong.

Demo Machine Had Only 1GB RAM, Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have been nice to see this amazing spec in the main story as well: the demo machine only had 1GB of RAM!

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

What world do you live in?

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Austerity Empowers]

They ported it to ARM for Android, and crappily. They will need to port it again to ARM for Windows 8, because of course, the windows API has nothing to do with Android.

If anyone were to ever start using Windows on Arm in the mobile/client space, perhaps they will port it one day. After a long period of development it may work right. As another pointed out they JUST started supporting 64-bit, even though many of us have been using 64-bit windows/linux for years.

Is this really news???

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until recently, MS produced windows mobile 6.5. That is a win32 API and has an excellent IDE and a nice virtual machine for development. I don't think it is very difficult for MS to move their windows mobile 6.5 from an ARM processor to an ARM processor. They also already have versions of word, excel, power point, and outlook.

Oh yes, they already had internet explorer running on ARM too...

So, I ask, Is this really news???

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[smash]

We're not talking about embedded systems. We're talking about a new version of Windows that will no doubt require a "Certified for Windows" sticker just like the typical windows boxes you buy today.

Windows on ARM is coming due to power consumption in the mobile space. Its not coming because of an abundance of ARM hardware already in circulation. You'll buy a new ARM based box for it.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Yunzil]

On an x86 system you know you've got a north bridge, a south bridge, a particular type of PIC, a certain kind of timer, PCI, etc.

Have you been paying attention at all in, say, the last 20 years?

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

* Modern security models

WHAT!!??!?? You are touting Microsoft security models as a selling feature?
I predict that MS will never be a major player in the tablet/phone market, for one simple reason: They will continue to call it "Windows", so the people who buy iy will expect it to work like Windows on their desktop/laptop. When it doesn't they will hate it.
This is something Apple did right.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Lokitoth]

The one caveat to this is that different processor architectures have different performane characteristics, so while the base code will run (sans JS-JIT, which is architecture dependent), likely memory mangement and arithmetic would be recoded for performance reasons.

Recompiled Chrome and Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

What doesn't make sense to me is that they were doing performance comparisons between IE10, IE9, FF and Chrome. On the same machine. So, unless they recompiled FF and Chrome to run on Windows+ARM, they must have been using some kind of emulator (wowARM, perhaps??). If that's the case, the performance comparison isn't very fair to begin with...

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been paying attention at all in, say, the last 20 years?

Obviously things aren't the exact same as in 1990. But I can take an old Slackware CD from 1993 and boot it on a modern system. You might not be utterly amazed by that, but you should be.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[bhtooefr]

Except when Alphas were running FX!32, they were quite a bit faster than x86 machines at the time, and could get away with the emulation overhead. (And even then, some software still sucked after a trip through the profiling recompiler.)

ARM CPUs are about as fast as the slowest x86 CPUs, nowadays.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[bhtooefr]

Since when is Windows endian-independent?

Because I recall reading quite a lot of stuff saying that the SPARC port of Windows was a failure due to Windows being unable to handle big-endian architectures.

(And, Alpha, MIPS, and PPC (at the time, anyway) were bi-endian, as are Itanium and ARM. And, fun fact, the de-facto standard in Linux is to treat all of those except for PPC (due to later PPCs being big-endian only) as little-endian.)

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[bhtooefr]

Well, Microsoft has demoed Office 2010 running on ARM, and Office 4.2 was ported to MIPS and Alpha, IIRC, and part of 97 (Word and Excel only, IIRC) ported to Alpha.

Also, ARM is pushing into the desktop space. Just because a SoC today will struggle with Windows doesn't mean that there won't be chips that can handle it when Windows for ARM actually comes out.

In any case, the rumor is that Windows for ARM won't run the normal UI or any of the normal apps - that it'll be used with a dedicated tablet UI, as a tablet OS that happens to be Windows NT instead of Windows CE under the hood.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[bhtooefr]

The funny thing with all of the NT RISC boxes is, they were basically x86 PCs with a socket for a RISC CPU instead of an x86 CPU, and Microsoft's own ARC firmware instead of IBM's BIOS. (Actually, I believe there's bits and pieces of ARC in NTLDR on x86.)

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[bhtooefr]

Well, Windows has support for HALs. IIRC, there's just one for x86 PCs.

While Alpha, MIPS, and PPC were all following a standard that was similar to that of the x86 PC, at least on Alpha, DEC went ahead and split everything up into HALs. So, the firmware had enough to boot NT far enough to select your HAL, and then you could pick the appropriate HAL for your chipset (or supply one on floppy).

Re:Does nobody remember MS's "portability" promise

[bhtooefr]

The poster that said ACE was confused, but he meant ARC - ARC being the system standard that MIPS, Alpha, and PPC-based NT systems used, much like how the Compaq Deskpro 386 defined the system standard that x86-based systems used.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[CAIMLAS]

I think they're going to change their naming convention.

Microsoft Windows: Desktops
Microsoft Server {Advanced, Enterprise, etc.}: Servers
Microsoft Embedded: platform for everything else, including Xboxes.

People don't really hate Windows. What they hate is crappy software. MS has improved that department a great deal in the past 5 years.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[man_of_mr_e]

A few comments. Microsoft has already ported office to several architectures years ago, and it's very likely that they've kept office portable since, given the high hopes Itanium had, then other architectures.

Second, Microsoft has never been as worried about commercial app compatibility as they have with custom app compatibility (all those special purpose apps that companies write internally). After 10 years, most of those apps have been converted to .NET which is architecture agnostic (for the most part). Any .net app will run without change on a version of windows for a new architecture. If they have their apps, and custom apps covered, that's probably 80% of the market, and given that ARM is likely only going to be used in tablets and possibly netbooks, rather than desktops.. they can sell an awful lot of those with 80% of the market.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[NJRoadfan]

IBM ported OS/2 to PPC as well, but it actually came with a x86 DOS VM... and it even ran Win-OS2! They put a lot of effort into that dead end port for nothing. http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/os2ppc/index.html

Re:Not "equivalent" - instead removes the requirem

[dbIII]

Why did I bother? In an attempt to clear up your confusion I not only failed but got accused of misunderstanding myself. I course I get the point of AV software. Please read either my post or the GP post again so that you can get the point of what is being discussed here.
Your final point is quite fortunately also incorrect but I am baffled as to how you can be so unobservant as to make it at all.

Re:Not "equivalent" - instead removes the requirem

[drsmithy]

I course I get the point of AV software.

Then why call it a bandaid ? It's not, it's part of a layered defense against malicious code.

What would a "non-bandaid" solution look like ? This:

Another security model is "deny by default" with a list of the things that are allowed. If it isn't on the list it isn't allowed to run or if it isn't on the list of things allowed to communicate it is not allowed to communicate.

Is ultimately useless so long as an ignorant end user can decide what is or is not on the whitelist.

Your final point is quite fortunately also incorrect but I am baffled as to how you can be so unobservant as to make it at all.

What's changed ? UAC is mostly about a better UI to existing functionality and a change to the default configuration of a certain subset of machines. ASLR and DEP are semantic changes enabled by hardware.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[petermgreen]

At the user code level ARM is somewhat standardised. The core instruction set is standardised (though comes in several different versions each adding extra instructions). There are serveral different FPUs but afaict most current phones are using the same one.

At the OS level things get a lot messier. On a PC there is a LOT of standard hardware in standard places and the non-standard hardware tends to be on a PCI bus (with a standardised method for accessing PCI configuration space) which makes it easy to enumerate. There is also a bios which knows how to initialise the hardware, read the code from the boot sector on a drive and run it while providing it with services that let it easily access the keyboard, mouse, screen and hdd. On an arm system you might have a PCI bus but you might not, the hardware may be mapped anywhere. ARM linux distros often have multiple kernels for different hardware and the kernels they do have have many special cases in them.

Re:Not "equivalent" - instead removes the requirem

[dbIII]

Forget the analogy then and focus on the reality.
With antivirus you have list of what is not allowed but any new threat gets free reign unless the bastards that code them are lazy enough to make it similar to an existing threat. That's one reason we are up to our necks in malware even with close to universal antivirus software adoption. That is one reason why Microsoft have made many changes over the last decade to their fully open model - but as I can tell you with three wasted days last week disinfecting win7 laptops, the changes are not moving fast enough for many of us.

Re:can you hack the iphone / ipad to run windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

That's something to chew into for the possibly coming Nvidia core forests..