Competition is great, but this also seems like a rather big setback to the goal of having multi-cloud applications, in instances where the app can only run on x86-64.
And so far there's no significant entry here for the ARM world. So you can't roll up a server install or Docker container that isn't, fundamentally, a hacked up tarball from some random vendor. And the market doesn't trust that.
As for sweeping anything away, it's true that there's work involved but it's not like we're starting from scratch in 1985. There's a lot of industry experience supporting new hardware and any company serious enough to be bidding on a Microsoft order for a boatload of Azure servers isn't going to walk away because they can't figure out how to package up some drivers.
The 64-bit world is very different. It is very homogeneous, it looks like an x64 server basically. Userspace actually wasn't ported that long ago. Fortunately now all the major Linux players fully support ARM64 servers (you can download an ISO and install on any ARM64 server without any voodoo, just like x64).
That, in combination with emulation for the x86-based legacy stuff, should be a powerful reason to use the Microsoft platform.
Even if ARM servers don't become a thing, the support of ARM servers only benefits Microsoft and their current "Universal Windows Platform" strategy.
No, UWP and .NET are orthogonal. When I need to, I’m using C++ to develop my UWP apps just fine.
Edit: and even when using .NET, by default, UWP apps don’t run in the virtual machine. Instead, they’re compiled to native code with .NET Native.
Modern computing has just been catching up with them.
The design was fundamentally flawed for other reasons, but they performed reasonably well compared to rival tablets, while also offering multiple log-ons, multi-tasking and full Microsoft Office, which those other tablets lacked. They also supported Active Directory, ditto.
Sorry, my mistake. Many thanks for the correction!
1.) Keyboard constantly flakes out and stops working - or the keyboard and touchpad works, but the touch screen stops working.
2.) Extremely limited software choices. You're stuck with whatever small subset of the garbage in the Windows Store was cross-compiled for Windows RT. Stuck with IE, no options to get Chrome or Firefox or something that works a little better.
3.) Extremely anemic performance. Mine chokes and dies trying to read email (in the godawful Metro Mail app) and browse the ticketing webapp that my company uses.
4.) Suffers the brunt of the awful Windows 8 Metro UI design changes.
5.) The operating system is effectively dead in the water, and won't be getting updates.
6.) Microsoft took a $900 million write-down on the product[1].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/business/2013/07/microsoft-takes-900...
You could try a software reset for the performance problems, bearing in mind that the updates will drive you mad. Unfortunately you can't fix the slow CPU or the too-small RAM. However, the current performance should still compare reasonably with another 2012 tablet.
> The operating system is effectively dead in the water, and won't be getting updates.
Look out for Windows 10 on the Snapdragon 835 later this year ;-)
> Microsoft took a $900 million write-down on the product
Yes, I bet that hurt, even when you have the odd $100 billion in spare cash.
Again, I'm far from an expert but it seems like a simple enough solution.
The hard part is wrangling the software: BIOS, drivers, testing and more testing, patches, microcode updates. Finding out that your wifi chip vendor has moved the chip to end-of-life just before you were ready to ship would be a non-issue if the software part were faster.
Finally, we’ll note that this roadmap is empty of any mentions of project Skybridge. CEO Lisa Su has commented that AMD has decided to change their focus away from Skybridge based on customer feedback. Customers were telling AMD that they didn't necessarily need socket compatible solutions, so AMD is going to work on differentiated solutions. That said, given that Skybridge was announced last year and planned for 20nm, I suspect that it has also become a victim of the short lifespan (and underperforming nature) of 20nm, leading to it being downplayed in favor of 14nm prodcts.