4 ms·
The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM. Solutions: all providers recomp
by 6ren 16y ago
The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM.
Solutions: all providers recompile for ARM (unmanageable). W8 emulates x86 (slow). W8 does very tricky JIT recompilation of x86 to ARM, as if it were a VM (amazing).
Launching .Net a few years back means that at least all software written for that is trivially retargeted. A clever (or serendipitous?) leveraging of its platform.
Apple tackled this problem differently: by banning alternative software platforms from iPhone/iPad, they rapidly created a substantial 3rd party software base of native apps from nothing.
- ippisl 16y agoMoore's law probably gives them enough speed to use x86 for very old software , .net gives them good results for new software .
- ippisl 16y agoMoore's law probably gives them enough speed to use x86 for very old software , .net gives them good results for new software .
- erik 16y agoI believe that DEC (Compaq?) shipped very capable JIT recompilation of x86 to Alpha a long time ago. They were trying to get past the hurdle of Intel's lock in. It didn't work.
- bbgm 16y agoAnd SGI tried something similar on their MIPS processors. That didn't work either
- wazoox 16y agoActually they shipped some of their workstations with softwindows 95 (which in the meanwhile, became Virtual PC, then was bought by Microsoft). It was close to usable on really fast machines :)
- wazoox 16y agoCalled FX!32, It was very similar with Rosetta, which came with the Intel Macs. It was viable because the Alpha at the time were really much faster than the Pentiums. On the other hand, low power ARM processors certainly won't be any faster than the competing intels, so that would make an emulation really dog slow.
- wtallis 16y ago.NET was a great start on the road towards portability, but it didn't make it very far. Most serious apps that use .NET also end up using native code for some reason or another, be it performance or third-party libraries or limitations of the .NET framework. All you could really say of .NET is that it makes it easier to identify the non-portable bits of your app so that you can rewrite them (or perhaps compile them as fat binaries?) once Microsoft manages to actually port the whole .NET framework, which hasn't been done before.