a lot of software work will need to be done” by application developers for Windows 8 on ARM. Leszinske pushed Intel’s ability to “rapidly modify chips for needs” and said that its x86 architecture will lead to a “faster time to market” as a big selling point for Atom. And contrary to the belief that ARM will be the only one to benefit from Windows 8, Leszinske believes that it will help Intel, saying “past platforms are a bad judge of the future”. Intel’s big selling point against ARM is the fact that Intel’s x86 architecture has for the most part been the primary home of Microsoft’s Windows desktop operating system. The only other architecture Windows used was DEC’s Alpha, but sadly Compaq and then HP put paid to that. While developing for ARM cores shouldn’t be too different, and frankly good developers won’t need a long time to get to grips with Windows on ARM, that learning curve is one of the things Intel is hoping will stand it in good stead. Leszinske said, “The investment to establish a new architecture is incredibly high and finding ways to manage to evolve software over time is the key to success. Someone could come up with the world’s greatest new microarchicture today but that doesn’t mean it will get adopted because there’s no software or no developers.” Intel are looking like they are running scared of ARM at this point. While Intel is dominant right now in the server market, there is a slight chance that if they are given the opportunity, ARM could seriously chip into Intel’s market share in the Server area. Read More]]>
Why doesn’t intel stop bitching about it and just make their own ARM chips?
Hi – minor correction – you wrote, ” The only other architecture Windows used was DEC’s Alpha, but sadly Compaq and then HP put paid to that.”. Actually, Microsoft released Windows XP for Itanium, the HP-Intel 64-bit processor architecture that Intel originally planned to replace x86. After AMD released a (quasi) 64-bit version of the x86/IA32 architecture, usually referred to as AMD64 or x64. Intel then adopted this same set of “extensions”.
Additionally, Microsoft released server versions of Windows, from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 for the Itanium chip. On top of all that, Windows NT (which led to XP/Vista/Windows 7) had a version for the MIPS architecture.
In total, Microsoft has supported x86/64 (if you count them as one), MIPS, DEC Alpha, and Itanium that I know of: four different processor architectures.