02-21-2012, 12:41 PM

Originally Posted by Soylentgreen

One thing that will determine the ARM’s success is how businesses will incorporate it. Most businesses slowly replace the oldest hardware with new hardware, in an on going , never ending trickle style upgrades.
The software used on an x86 will also have to run on the ARM. If the ARM can utilize an x86 emulator, that will help somewhat, but that starts to get murky when you have streaming applications, Citrix environments, VM ware, etc.
I guess my questions for the future of it all, is how well will it play with the older x86 environment? The ARM may be relegated to laptop, tablets and other mobile devices for quite some time.

That is the $64K question

But with Apple's track record of breaking bonds with backwards compatibility, it would not surprise me in the least to see them abandon x86 at some point. They did it with 68K and again with the PPC. If Apple feels at some point as though they can in-source CPU design across platforms and take advantage of synergies with iOS and their mobile devices, I could see them making a jump before the rest of the industry.

That's not to say that x86 is going anywhere, anytime soon in the WinTel world.

02-21-2012, 12:57 PM

Originally Posted by cwa107

In this case, that parallel development of the same underlying core has greatly benefited the platform. Although this is somewhat of a weakness for Linux, in that case, the user is presented with overwhelming variety. It's a little different in terms of CPUs, since they're fairly transparent to the ordinary user.

There's a lot of big guns working on ARM, including Apple. This is going to be an interesting race to watch.

What's interesting here (not to belabour the Linux comparison) is that Linux has huge levels of corporate support as well.

From where I sit, the reason ARM has succeeded relative to Linux is due to Google's (Android) and Microsoft's (WOA) insistence on consistency in platform hardware. As I understand it, Android and WOA only support a specific subset of all ARM hardware which helps to pare down the potentially crippling diverse hardware implementations.

Originally Posted by Soylentgreen

The software used on an x86 will also have to run on the ARM. If the ARM can utilize an x86 emulator, that will help somewhat, but that starts to get murky when you have streaming applications, Citrix environments, VM ware, etc.
I guess my questions for the future of it all, is how well will it play with the older x86 environment? The ARM may be relegated to laptop, tablets and other mobile devices for quite some time.

It's not going to end up that way though with WOA at least. To quote Ars Technica:

But though it looks the same as the traditional desktop, it has one major difference: it won't run any old application. Microsoft has long said that WOA will not include an x86 emulator, so legacy applications would never run directly on the platform, but there was always the possibility that existing desktop applications could be recompiled. That option is now unambiguously eliminated, with Microsoft saying "WOA does not support running, emulating, or porting existing x86/64 desktop apps." Office is a special, unique case. All third-party applications for WOA will be Metro applications delivered via the Windows Store, and must meet the restrictions imposed on those applications.

WOA's success will depend entirely on a new ecosystem of applications so you can bet that corporate environments will either adopt new ARM versions of applications or just won't buy into it.

02-21-2012, 01:04 PM

Originally Posted by vansmith

What's interesting here (not to belabour the Linux comparison) is that Linux has huge levels of corporate support as well.

From where I sit, the reason ARM has succeeded relative to Linux is due to Google's (Android) and Microsoft's (WOA) insistence on consistency in platform hardware. As I understand it, Android and WOA only support a specific subset of all ARM hardware which helps to pare down the potentially crippling diversity.

It's not going to end up that way though with WOA at least. To quote Ars Technica:WOA's success will depend entirely on a new ecosystem of applications so you can bet that corporate environments will either adopt new ARM versions of applications or just won't buy into it.

And that, I think, may be the reason that Windows 8 tablets are essentially going to be DOA.

Think of it from the ordinary consumer's standpoint....

Windows 8 comes to the market. It's flashy, you can get it in a variety of form factors, and they all run Windows! So, in my mind, that means that not only can I buy a Windows 8 tablet and run these cool new touch-enabled apps, but hey, I can run my old Windows apps too! Hey wait.... what's that you say? So, it's Windows 8 and it looks just like what I see on my PC, but I can only run some apps and not others? Well, what the heck is the point?

Don't underestimate the power of consumer confusion. It can (and will) sink a product if there are too many gotchas.

02-21-2012, 01:27 PM

Absolutely. Unless Microsoft is somehow able to articulate with perfect clarity the implications for using WOA, they're going to hit a lot of roadblocks. The reasoning is simple - 90% of consumers don't care what's under the hood. If MS can't make the movement between the two seamless, WOA's going to have difficulty gaining traction. I do think however that this problem is obviated somewhat by the use of the Windows Store on both the ARM and x86 version. However, the ability to use any application on x86 versions makes ARM versions a difficult choice to justify unless the price is right. The fact that Office will be preinstalled with WOA might help though (source).

All that said, it doesn't really seem like MS knows how it's going to inform end-users of the differences (here):

The company said that it will in some way make it very clear to consumers that Windows on ARM is not identical to the x86/x64 version, to avoid the possibility of confused users trying to use x86 software on ARM machines. It stopped short of explaining how it would do this.

That's not to mention the, in some cases, drastic relearning required for UI interaction (once again, I refer to an Ars article).

02-21-2012, 01:49 PM

Originally Posted by vansmith

Absolutely. Unless Microsoft is somehow able to articulate with perfect clarity the implications for using WOA, they're going to hit a lot of roadblocks. The reasoning is simple - 90% of consumers don't care what's under the hood. If MS can't make the movement between the two seamless, WOA's going to have difficulty gaining traction. I do think however that this problem is obviated somewhat by the use of the Windows Store on both the ARM and x86 version. However, the ability to use any application on x86 versions makes ARM versions a difficult choice to justify unless the price is right. The fact that Office will be preinstalled with WOA might help though (source).

All that said, it doesn't really seem like MS knows how it's going to inform end-users of the differences (here):

That's not to mention the, in some cases, drastic relearning required for UI interaction (once again, I refer to an Ars article).

Even with a stunningly brilliant marketing campaign (the possibility of which I find dubious, given Microsoft's recent track record), I would be really surprised if they could effectively convey that message to the consumer market.

I might be overly cynical, but given the number of people I run into on a regular basis who can't tell the difference between Windows and Office (they think that they are one and the same product, just because they're both made by Microsoft), I can't see Microsoft articulating the difference between WOA and x86 Windows 8.

02-21-2012, 02:06 PM

Originally Posted by cwa107

I might be overly cynical, but given the number of people I run into on a regular basis who can't tell the difference between Windows and Office (they think that they are one and the same product, just because they're both made by Microsoft), I can't see Microsoft articulating the difference between WOA and x86 Windows 8.

Overly cynical? Remember who you're talking to here.

This problem wouldn't be so bad if there was an emulation layer. Leaving ARM users out in the cold with no means to run x86 applications is only going to exacerbate the problem. What's going to happen the ARM user who, thinking they bought a Windows machine, can't download Firefox and install that? Although I think the Windows Store will alleviate this problem somewhat, it certainly won't make it go away. To be fair to MS though, the release is still relatively far off. Although I, like you, don't see MS having the marketing skills to make this crystal clear, anything is possible.

In the grand scheme of things, this is really only one part of two major problems (the other being a drastic overall of the UI which eliminates many of the visual cues most end users depend on). That's for another thread though.

02-21-2012, 04:55 PM

hmmm...iOSX and iOS...they already got rid of the Mac in Mac OSX. Sounds like the next move. In my opinion, I don't mind the integration as long as the fundamental OSX features are still there along with the added features found in iOS.