Windows on ARM a reality.

[theeedude]

For me, breaking with x86 legacy and having a clean start is one of the attractive features of Windows on ARM, not a drawback. Supporting backwards compatibility is an inefficiency that x86 Windows is stuck with. The current x86 Windows ecosystem is also not power optimized. The thinking is lets just cram in features and let Intel worry about performance and power consumption. What you get is software that is generally optimized for single thread CPU centric performance. That is the worst thing for power consumption. That's one reason Wintel can't compete with ARM devices. Wintel notebooks and tablets are trying to be mobile devices to the user, while pretending to be desktops to the software, which is written without power consumption in mind and demands desktop level of performance, power consumption be damned.
With Windows for ARM, software maker is going to have to explicitly think about tuning the OS and application to live within the power envelope of a mobile device and take advantage of the hardware to extract as much performance as efficiently as possible. This means multi-threading and using GPU acceleration whenever it is possible. The fact that someone has to port an application to ARM is a good thing, because that's the opportunity to sit down, review the code, trim the fat and optimize it. I don't want a tonne of software that is simply recompiled for ARM. I want software that has been tuned for mobile use by construction.

 

[poofyhairguy]

The biggest headache will be device drivers, which will need a significant amount more of work to re-engineer to be compatible with the platform.

That is the big issue.

Eventually a "Rosetta" type solution will emerge that will let you run x86 on Arm, and hardware years from now will be powerful enough to do it smoothly. That seems to be a given.

The real issue is whether the masses will accept a (premium by this point, as Android will dominate the low-end tablet market) Windows branded "computer" that doesn't work with Joe America's old printer/tvtuner/etc. Drivers are the biggest reason so many came to hate Vista early on, and I can see MS falling into that same trap again if they are not careful.

 

[costea310d]

The really important 3rd party software has been ported years ago.
I have in mind the huge ArcGis library that has been completely .NET translated and compiled , more than 5 years ago.