
NVIDIA's Project Denver CPU puts the nail in Wintel's coffin - julian37
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/01/nvidias-project-denver-cpu-puts-the-nail-in-wintels-coffin.ars
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rbanffy
As much as I would love to drive a wooden stake through its heart, shoot its
head off with a 12 gauge shotgun and, just to be safe, put a couple silver
bullets in Wintel's dead body and then help Nvidia on putting a couple nails
in its coffin so we can throw it into the lava pit of Mount Doom, I am a bit
skeptical. Wintel has a ton of momentum behind it.

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ghshephard
Windows running on X86 will still be popular, and, in fact, will likely be
managing greater than 90% (95%? 99%?) market share for the foreseeable future,
particularly on windows desktops/laptops. The point of the article, was that
it's no longer "Wintel" - Windows will now run on ARM. That was the big news
of the day.

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rbanffy
Like it was pointed out elsewhere, it's not the first time Windows NT runs on
non-x86 platforms. MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha and Itanium had their ports, along
with some limited software support. It was this limited support that doomed
those machines, despite the fact they had enormous speed advantages over their
Intel-based counterparts, something ARM doesn't.

Unless Microsoft can pull an unprecedented movement in their 3rd party
ecosystem, I see no reason to consider this a world-changing event.

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wladimir
Making it easier to support alternative architectures beyond x86 might have
been one of the motives behind .NET. After all, .NET bytecode, like Java, is
platform independent, or can be made platform independent with minimal effort.
This means that ARM windows will already have a "3rd party ecosystem".

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sid0
As David Wheeler said, "all problems in computer science can be solved by
another level of indirection".

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ambirex
While I think that "the nail in Wintel's coffin" headline is, to put it
kindly, hyperbole; I agree the the smart phone market has really given a boost
to the ARM ecosystem. I can't help but feel their success is directly tied to
Windows 8 supporting ARM. I hope for NVIDIA's sake that it doesn't go the
direction of WinFS.

