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My thinking is that we may be seeing MSFT working to commoditize CPUs and in the process end up strengthening their position while weakening ARM, AMD, and Intel
by shrubble 2y ago
My thinking is that we may be seeing MSFT working to commoditize CPUs and in the process end up strengthening their position while weakening ARM, AMD, and Intel's positions.
In the past MSFT was always wedded to x86 but now with other ISAs coming, that presumably Windows 11 can be ported to...
- jayb_oz 2y ago> In the past MSFT was always wedded to x86 ?? WindowsNT shipped on x86, Alpha, and MIPS. Then got ported to X64, PowerPC and Itanium. For the NT line, historically Microsoft was very supportive of other ISAs. The market wasn't. (I worked on applications supporting a number of those. x86/x64 won the price/performance war).
- shrubble 2y agoNo one bought it on those alternative ISAs, however. The Alphas and MIPS vendors had a port but what percentage of those systems ended up running a Unix? This time it is different since DOS and 16bit Windows is out of the picture. This time you have multiple vendors/OEMs actually shipping e.g. Snapdragon-based Windows systems. Lenovo might make money selling such laptops, but over time MSFT will be the largest beneficiary of the "CPU wars".
- The_Colonel 2y agoThere was already Windows on ARM in not so distant past, but it failed. I'm not convinced this time it will be different.
- Marsymars 2y agoThere was Windows RT, which failed, but the current Windows on ARM platform has been a thing since 2017. The first few Win10 on ARM devices aren't upgradeable to Windows 11, but anything since the Snapdragon 850 in 2018 is fully supported by Windows 11: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-qualcomm-processors https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi... I guess it could still fail, but to me it seems a bit weird to be predicting the failure of a 7 year-old platform just when it's starting to see a real uptick in momentum.
- steve1977 2y agoThe very name NT initially was a testament to that, as it originally referred to the Intel i860 (codename N10).
- chucke1992 2y agoRather than MSFT it is just becoming a natural progression - we used to have a lot of various CPU makes in the past too at one point. With ARM now everybody can ship their processors. Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm + big tech giants like Apple are already producing them, MSFT is also planning to do that. I recall either Google or Facebook wanted too and so on.
- zbentley 2y agoWhen it comes to porting Win11, does MSFT have something like Rosetta to ease the pain for applications during the transitional period? Sure, plenty of windows users (business and personal computing) rely primarily on first-party apps, browsers, and big flagship apps (which could presumably leverage Microsoft partnerships to release on new architectures early enough that users wouldn’t notice much pain). But the long tail of widely used applications that aren’t big enough that I’d trust them to release ports by the time of an ARM (or whatever) hardware release is huge in Windows land—much larger than on MacOS.