News - Microsoft reportedly to announce full Windows for ARM at CES

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A couple of reports reckon Microsoft has finally produced a full version of its operating system for ARM-based chips.

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This wouldn't really be a shock - the question is whether it's CE based (which does ARM now) or whether they're porting NT to ARM (perfectly possible - remember itanium or alpha?). The former is far less interesting, but then again the latter requires a tablet shell on top really.

If, as dangle says, it's an NT port to ARM, then there'll still be a hell of a lot of work to do in order to get existing applications onto ARMs. It wouldn't surprise me if they rely a lot on Silverlight & .net to ease things along if they go the NT route.

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Originally Posted by Steve

If, as dangle says, it's an NT port to ARM, then there'll still be a hell of a lot of work to do in order to get existing applications onto ARMs. It wouldn't surprise me if they rely a lot on Silverlight & .net to ease things along if they go the NT route.

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Question is, do they need to? TBH porting to a different processor architecture is a recompile given matching APIs (and dev tools which MS has) and I'm not sure you'd want exactly the same apps on a lighter platform (think office 'lite') anyway, especially as they'd have to be adapted to touch use. Developing apps for CE (back in the day) was a doddle, even if you wanted to use MFC or .NET - it's all there (albeit in 'lite' form) along with a Win32 API.
My bet would be a ce core like WP7 with a silverlight layer to ease the UI development. An extension of the WP7 OS onto tablets (like Apple did) makes more sense for them - although i'd personally love a Windows 7 Tablet Edition (for ARM) I'm not sure it makes sense!

P.S. thanks Steev :mrgreen:

I think dangle suspended the detail for all of us to see.

NT could be ported, but it probably won't be, the PE (think .exe/.dll) format was always designed to allow it to house multiple binary code files for different CPUs. One exe can therefore have code for ARM,x64,x86.

But it will probably be an extension of the CE kernel, which isn't really a bad thing, it has many design ideas that make it easier to integrate, this is why so many of the chinese nock offs use winmo under the hood rather than linux (because when your pirating, the price has no bearing afterall!).