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Comment by kaneraz | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused. People expected x86 emulation on ARM architectures? That sounds a bit backwards to me.

I honestly expected that they were going to try at least for the initial release. Apple did release Rosetta when they moved to Intel, which allowed PowerPC-based applications to run on x86 Macs.

I'm not sure how much use that got, though, considering that Rosetta had a lot of limitations, and fairly terrible performance in a lot of areas. That's probably the main reason that MS didn't bother trying to support it.

Rosetta saw plenty of use just from Adobe apps. It took them about a year and half IIRC to release an x86 version of Photoshop.

edit: and didn't Office:Mac take forever too?

yeah, office 2008 was the first native x86 version, IIR (and I swear it takes longer to start up then the PPC version of 2004 did under Rosetta, which is just ridiculous).

Rosetta worked because the switch to intel processors gave Apple such a performance boost compared to their PPC systems, that existing PPC applications worked with about the same performance as they used to on PPC native.

The same probably wouldn't be true for i386 -> ARM.

Yes, this article is way off target. Who exactly expected ARM Windows to run x86 applications? Show me one reference. Anyone?

When Intel trumpeted the fact that ARM Windows 8 machines wouldn't run legacy apps, MS reps called it "inaccurate and misleading". From the article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/19/microsoft_contradict....

Well, since a lot of Windows software runs on .net framework's CLR (VM with a bytecode interpreter not unlike the Java VM), a lot of legacy apps actually should run just fine on ARM.

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