
ARM's Feeling Lucky; Netbook 'Battle' Just Beginning? - 10ren
http://www.osnews.com/story/21313/ARM_s_Feeling_Lucky_Netbook_Battle_Just_Beginning_
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pieter
Wow.. I thought the iPhone/iPod touch were pushing ARM and BSD out with their
37 million units. But ARM goes through 1.3 billion units every quarter? That's
huge.

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jmtulloss
ARM is in everything. Since their architecture is so flexible, they have
solutions for the simplest needs as well as the more complex (netbooks).
Anything you look at, from MP3 players and cell phones to flash controllers
have a very good chance of having an ARM processor in them.

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braindead_in
Another nightmare for windows on netbooks. Imagining porting the OS and then
all applications for ARM. That would be fun!

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chadgeidel
I wonder how much of the NT codebase is still portable. Back in the "early
days" you could get NT for MIPS and Alpha
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms>) but I don't
think Microsoft is willing to make a ARM version of Windows v.Next. This seems
to be a pretty huge roadblock for manufacturers of these netbooks. It's my
opinion that to remain mainstream and continue to sell large numbers of units
they (Asus, MSI, etc) will have to offer Windows on every model.

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pavlov
Windows NT also supported PowerPC (the CPU was switched to little-endian mode
on boot).

I'm sure they could support ARM for the base Windows OS, but lack of
application compatibility would mean a lot of user confusion that would only
damage the brand. ("It's called Windows, it looks like Windows, so why doesn't
anything happen when I insert the install CD for FooApp from 1999?")

Emulating x86 on ARM wouldn't do much good either. Apple was able to pull it
off for their PPC->x86 transition because the new CPUs were substantially
faster and memory had become abundant. ARM-based netbooks don't have either of
those benefits (if the budget for these machines allowed big CPUs and lots of
memory, they would just use x86).

