5 ms·

They also announced a database filesystem for Windows ... 6? Maybe earlier?

• leoc 16y ago
  Windows NT has been ported to PowerPC, DEC Alpha and Itanium in the past, so an ARM port shouldn't be especially hard. Longhorn was probably a much more ambitious change to WinNT than a CPU port. MS would probably want to introduce some kind of universal binary format as well, but that shouldn't be undoable either.
  • skymt 16y ago
    MS already has a universal binary format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_assembly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_assembly I wouldn't be too surprised if one part of MS's .NET push was a desire for architecture independence.
    • wtallis 16y ago
      That's not a universal binary. It's a bytecode package. It still needs to be run through an interpreter or a JIT compiler, just like a JAR file for Java. A universal binary contains actual machine code for multiple architectures. Universal binary support requires deeper changes to the OS and can complicate testing, but it's basically a requirement for making cross-platform high performance code because a JIT compiler can't spend as much time optimizing code as an ahead-of-time compiler. Machine-independent bytecode paired with a high-quality VM allows you to ship a cross-platform executable, but it's not going to be enough when ARM PCs are facing an uphill battle to prove their performance is acceptable to a market that isn't particularly satisfied with Intel's Atom.
      • nitrogen 16y ago
        IIRC optimized, compiled versions of .Net assemblies can be cached by the system, allowing higher performance than JIT compilation.
        • wtallis 16y ago
          It's a smart, easy optimization, so I'd be surprised if .NET wasn't using it, but ultimately it has the same effect as reducing the frequency of GC pauses. It doesn't lead to faster execution. It doesn't change the fact that the code didn't pass through a more thorough analyzer/optimizer. How good are JIT compilers at automatic vectorization, for example? Opportunities for automatic vectorization could be encoded into bytecode such that the SIMD capabilities of different architectures could be used, but I don't think .NET does that.
      • Tamerlin 16y ago
        That depends on the market, I think. AFAIK most of the dissatisfaction with Atom is due to its power consumption rather than its performance, so an ARM with comparable computing power and lower power consumption would be quite satisfactory for most users when teamed up with a solid GPU.
    • cyrus_ 16y ago
      A universal binary format would be something like what Apple uses now to support both PowerPC and x86 versions of an application within the same file.
  • corysama 16y ago
    To ensure portability, NT was originally written for the DEC Alpha and later ported to Intel. (It was also original created with a Pig-Latin UI and later localized to English.) Also, the Xbox360 runs a stripped-down branch of NT on big-endian PowerPC. An native ARM port should be relatively easy.
    • pavlov 16y ago
      Actually MIPS was the original architecture target for NT (the DEC Alpha didn't exist yet when they started).
      • leoc 16y ago
        Apparently the very first target was ... the Intel i860: http://www.winsupersite.com/article/reviews/windows-server-2003-the-road-to-gold-part-one-the-early-years.aspx http://www.winsupersite.com/article/reviews/windows-server-2...