A daily digest of IT news, curated from blogs, forums and news sites around the web each morning. We highlight the key commentary and demystify the real story.
Microsoft (MSFT) has denied Intel's (INTC) claim that Windows 8 won't run existing applications on ARM (ARM). Or perhaps it denied that there'll be four version of "Windows vNext" for ARM; it's not terribly clear. What is clear, however, is that Microsoft's unhappy with Intel's lie... uh, sorry, "factual inaccuracies." In IT Blogwatch, bloggers get factually accurate.
Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention Reuters gets pwned by the old "sticky Croatian" trick...
Gregg Keizer reports:
Microsoft's comments today were in reaction to ... Intel's annual shareholder meeting, where ... the general manager of Intel's software and services group said that Windows 8 ... would not run older Windows software on ... ARM-based processors.
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The new Windows for ... [ARM] systems-on-a-chip (SoC) processors ... will be Microsoft's big push into the tablet market. ... No matter what it does, Microsoft has a shot at making it big in tablets.
Rik Myslewski notes a lack of detail from Redmond:
At Intel's Investor Meeting 2011 at the company's ... headquarters on Tuesday ... Intel software chief Renée James ... told her keynote audience that ... Windows 8 ... for ARM-based systems will not run "legacy" applications. ... "Not now. Not ever," she said.
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On Wednesday, Microsoft took issue ... but it declined to provide any clarification. ... "Intels statements ... about Microsofts plans for the next version of Windows were factually inaccurate. ... We have been clear about our goals ... we are at the technology demonstration stage. ... We have no further details or information."
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes adds 2+2:
One can assume that apps for this platform will revolve around .NET/Silverlight/Metro/Visual Studio 2010. But ... it does mean that that ARM-based Windows 8 systems wont be able to run most of the stuff that youre currently using.
But John C. Dvorak gets even crankier than usual:
There seems to be an outbreak of stupidity in the computing world. ... Microsoft says that Intel is misleading the public. ... Excuse me? How are they being misleading?
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Old X86 software expecting to find an X86 chip underneath ... will not work on an ARM chip. I suppose it could work if an emulator could be cobbled together ... [but] emulators only work when the chip doing the emulation is more powerful, not less.
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Meanwhile, Intel should do two things: 1.) Find a way to compete with ARM ... and 2.) Quit fretting about Windows on ARM. Who cares? ... In the early 1990s ... Microsoft decided that it was going to port Windows NT on to every chip it could. ... It was a waste of time for Microsoft, and the whole project was scrapped. ... Intel should ignore this altogether.
Two armies have been massing troops in their respective strongholds. ... Based in Cambridge, England, ARM Holdings dominates 32-bit microprocessor sales. ... The emerging war between ARM and x86 microprocessors is ... more competitive and interesting than I ever imagined
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The ARM Cortex-A8 achieves surprisingly competitive performance ... while consuming power at levels far below the most energy miserly ... Intel Atom. ... [But] the video subsystem is very limited [and] memory support is a very slow 32-bit, DDR2-200MHz. ... However, newer ARM-based products like the NVIDIA Tegra 2 address many of the performance deficiencies.
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Unmatched software support has always been the "ace in the hole" for the x86 contingent. ... The Intel Atom N450 is a remarkable product in that it is the first x86 SoC ... suitable for smartphones.
