Taiwanese OEMs Consider ARM Products For Windows 8 167
siliconbits writes "At CeBIT 2011, we went around the stands from some of the biggest component manufacturers in the world and asked them a simple question, would you consider bringing out ARM products (barebones, laptops, tablets, motherboards) for Windows 8? The answer was a unanimous yes; like Microsoft, the same firms that have been faithful Intel and AMD partners for years are prepared to explore other territories as soon as Windows 8 will go live."
Re:ARM Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the same as with Windows 64 bit and why we didn't saw much of it despite the prices for RAM are very low. I guess with Windows 7 the developers finally released some software for 64 bit. That's what, like 9 to 10 years since AMD came with the amd64 architecture?
The reason 64-bit wasn't was adopted quickly was more about need vs features. The model MS choose for their 64-bit migration (LLP) meant that 32-bit programs were backwards compatible. So there was no need for a consumer to get 64-bit Office because 32-bit Office would work fine in 64-bit Windows. If all the 32-bit programs worked either way on 64-bit or 32-bit OS, there wasn't as much as a push to migrate. Unfortunately 64-bit Windows would often times require new drivers. So there were more negatives moving to 64-bit on Windows unless the consumer had a specific need like more memory addressing. For the most part, businesses were more open to using 64-bit Windows Server as there was a need in many cases to access more than 3GB of RAM.
Software companies that wanted to take advantage of 64-bit for Windows had to maintain separate 32-bit and 64-bit binary and source code versions during the migration. While the 32-bit version would work on either Windows flavor, the 64-bit would not work on a 32-bit OS. Many companies were reluctant to maintain two versions especially if moving to 64-bit provided no real advantage.
The Linux/Unix/OS X model (LP) took a different approach as that model focused more on forward compatibility. A 32-bit program could be made into a 64-bit program with a recompile and testing to ensure there were no special scenarios that required 32-bit addresses, etc. Software companies would have to maintain two binary versions but for the most part could maintain one version of source code. With Linux/Unix/OS X, a great deal of software was open source so that it was far easier to make this migration.