Microsoft Gives ARM Massive Christmas Present

If the ARM guys have been getting a little feisty of late, now we know the reason why. Microsoft has given them the biggest Christmas present they could ever hope for – a port of Windows to ARM.

This means ARM can get into the computer market – something that has been denied to it by the Microsoft-Intel, OS-processor, combo.

Bloomberg says that, at CES 2011 in January, Microsoft will announce a version of the Windows OS that runs on ARM chips.

According to Bloomberg, the version of Windows will be tailored to portable devices.

This is the biggest break ARM has had for years. From immediate access to the netbook market, it should allow ARM to make inroads into laptops, desktops and servers.

For Microsoft it’s a new way to get into portable devices which is a market which has largely proved elusive to the company.

For Intel it looks like the worst disaster it has encountered since IBM’s first PC

married Intel’s processor architecture to Microsoft’s OS.

That has given Intel a lock on the processor market which, according to the US FTC, has “engaged in unfair, deceptive and anti-competitive conduct which unfairly prevented companies from competing, bolstered Intel’s monopoly, and harmed consumers by stunting innovation, diminishing quality, and keeping prices higher than they would otherwise be.”

That monopoly is now under threat.

The Microsoft-ARM move could go some way to explaining Intel’s takeover of McAfee. About to be denied the exclusivity of the customer lock-up of the Wintel combination of Intel and Windows, Intel could have been looking for another way to lock in microprocessor customers via software which works better on Intel processors than on anyone else’s processors.

Although the Intel-McAfee takeover has been approved by the US FTC, it is under investigation by the EC which is said to be wary of the likelihood that Intel will put features in its processors which makes McAfee work better with Intel processors than it does with rival processors.

The ARM microprocessor, which has its main customer base in mobile phones, was originally designed as a computer processor – to power Acorn Computers’ first 16-bit computer back in the 1980s.


Comments

4 comments

  1. Microsoft is late in the tablet game. They understand it very late…I think 2 year later then Apple. That is why a visionary CEO is required. They should start porting server and desktop version of window OS to ARM….which google and others already initiated with open source OS. I think once organization become too big they become less and less receptive to new ideas….it is like in our DNA, which stops making new cell once we are grown up. And then end is certain…rule of nature.

  2. @John
    There is a growing opinion that the ONLY possible way to have secure digital communications is to have specially designed hardware support for the underlying Cryptography primitives. This effects McAfee, because part of the reason for the propagation of virus’s and worms, is the ability to bypass intended software security, by a variety of means “exploits”.
    In a future world where digital content is openly shared “streaming IPTV” the security of the communications stack will be essential to the financial success of the business. So IMHO it is highly likely that Intel will build in a bunch of hardware support features that achieve this security.
    try goggling: AES cryptography, “side channel attacks”

  3. I am willing to bet this is true, and I am willing to bet it will be an ARM version of Windows 8 – to be released very slightly after the x86 version. A couple of points:
    1) The last slide from this ARM presentation indicates we will see ARM Notebooks in 2H12: http://www.jp.arm.com/event/pdf/forum2010/t4-2.pdf
    2) Steve Ballmer said Windows 8 was Microsoft’s “riskiest product bet”.
    3) There are reliable rumours that Windows 8 will have an App Store, and they’ll probably make an ARM version of .NET so all existing managed applications will work.
    4) Cortex-A15 adds native hardware virtualisation support and one major focus of Windows 8 will be virtualisation: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ballmer-riskiest-product-bet-by-microsoft-is-the-next-release-of-windows/7786
    The real question is whether ARM chips will be able to run native x86 applications. One very interesting possibility is that this will be handled by a combination of the new virtualisation mechanism and a Mac OS-like Universal Binary system. It’s also very interesting that Microsoft took an ARM ISA/Architecture license in July although I don’t see what they’d need it for here…

  4. I kind of buy what you say about Intel/McAfee, but in the end McAfee is just another company in the world of software based security. Whether Intel builds in some kind of technology into the silicon that only Mcafee software can use is probably irrelevant, since the only reason software like that Peddled by Mcafee exists in the first place is because of the ease of exploitation of inherently insecure operating systems like Windows.
    ARM has a very compelling technology called TrustZone, which actually banks the processor and the other hardware in an SoC into secure and non-secure zones, making an unbreakable layer of security at the system level in the hardware. This is undoubtedly going to be a feature of that there nifty NFC enabled smart phone shown by Eric Schmidt during his fireside at Web 2.0 World, and with the possibility of most payment systems being built into mobile devices via NFC, ARM’s security technologies will become much more important than anything done by Intel.
    As I say, Mcafee isn’t the only show in town, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear some form of partnering of ARM and other companies in the security software industry in future (on top of those partnerships they already have).

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