That said, I'm all for more ARM support in the world.
It looks like it will run .NET apps with little or no reworking. They probably borrowed a lot of the work of the .NET Compact Framework team for a reverse port. Expect native SDKs later, after the initial launch.
I'm betting they have some compatibility magic cooked up that we haven't seen yet.
Emulation has already been suggested. How about the possibility of having a launch hook that recompiles x86 machine code to ARM machine code? MS is on the short list of companies with the necessary resources to pull that sort of trick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit
It is running on everything from embedded systems, to phones, to desktops, to clusters. Throw in that all the hardware vendors who are interested in "the Next Windows" and Microsoft has just laid out a roadmap for the next ten years.
Then I can install a decent OS on the machine and be happy.
Unfortunately, I'll have to live with an unsupported hardware. I have no illusion this fad won't be a short-lived one.
The batteries will be a little smaller, to reduce weight, but 24 hours of operation on a single charge... that might becomes the standard.
Last time MS tried to be multi-architecture, they failed miserably. They couldn't even be bothered to port Office to non-x86 machines. And nobody buys a PC to run only Windows and Office. They'll have to do a whole lot more than they did and I don't think they would be capable of.
Right, this has always been the play on virtualization for the OS. Don't get stuck in legacy mode, virtualize, and move on. MS may finally be doing what everyone said they should do.
Not on ARM. Emulation is possible but will be really slow.
A factor of 10x slowdown would probably be reasonable. Is the current state of the art on ARM able to get it below 10x?
And, BTW, nobody would buy a computer that can run only Windows and Office.
To be fair, only the Office part would have to run under emulation. As soon as the code calls into core Windows, the machine would be running ARM code. I don't know where the boundary is with Office.
I do agree that only running Windows and Office is not sufficient. But its a starting point for the discussion.
Also, consider that A-15 may be competitive with current x86 designs. Who knows what will Intel and AMD bring by the time A-15/Denver machines hits the shelves.
That said, I find my modest Atom good enough for Django programming the slightly less modest Core i5 very reasonable with Java and Eclipse. It will take some iterations until ARM catches up (I assume it will move faster than x86 because of its simple architecture). I have no doubt a relatively modest ARM machine will be good enough for most of my then current usage.
Maybe we just have really fast networks.
I assumed he meant something where the network latency would impose a keystroke-level degredation in performance.
The picture may not be that grim if at least timing-critical parts of Office can be made into fat binaries. I would not bet on straight emulation of uncooperative code, however.
The HAL was built so that you can retarget quickly. I think people would be pretty upset if it was your team that checked in some code that blocked them from porting to a new platform quickly.
Tell that to those who wanted to run Office and Visual Studio on their Alpha boxes...
It took years before AMD64 was fully supported and it's semicompatible with ancient x86. ARM is a completely different beast. I am pointing out Microsoft tried to make this move before and failed.
When Apple did it (and they did it twice), the carrots were huge performance gains. This carrot implies a loss of performance. Unless hardware makers start flooding the market with Windows 8-compatible ARM machines, 3rd parties may opt to stay within the comfy confines of x86/AMD64.
It is a very tricky move.
Also, since most of what a Linux distro offers (and that includes OpenOffice, editors, IDEs, languages, games) already runs on ARM, this move would also benefit the competition that's already positioned to benefit from this without the need to convince 3rd parties to jump along. I imagine Microsoft will impose restrictions on what OS and software you will be able to install on those machines to counter that.
It will be fun to watch.
The carrot in this case is battery life. And I think the markets will turn out to be different ones. The ARM machines will largely be tablets and netbooks. The Intel SoCs will have poorer battery life, but better perf. That's where you'll have VS and such.
Of course .NET apps will run across both. And the Windows Marketplace will largely be .NET apps.
They failed at this before, because there was no motivation to succeed. Alpha, MIPS, Itanium, were all DOA. But they did help ensure that the Windows kernel was portable.