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posted by mrpg on Friday December 09 2016, @05:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-what-customers-have-been-demanding-for-years dept.

Cnet reports: Windows laptops in 2017 could act and feel more like a phone

Microsoft wants its computers to be more nimble.

To that goal, the Qualcomm announced at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Community event on Wednesday that its Windows 10 devices will support the Snapdragon 835 processor, which you'll see in many top-tier phones next year. The chip will be able to provide Gigabit LTE connectivity, nearly double your battery life and pack it all into even smaller devices.

From the following story we get:

At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen today, Microsoft announced a range of hardware-driven initiatives to modernize the PC and address two big goals. The first is expanded support for mixed reality; the second is to produce a range of even more power-efficient, mobile, always-connected PCs powered by ARM processors.

[...] The second aspect of the push to modernize the PC is the desire for ever longer battery life, greater portability, and connectivity. To that end, Microsoft is bringing back something that it had before: Windows for ARM processors. Qualcomm-powered Windows 10 PCs will hit the market in 2017.

The truth is that Windows for ARM has never really gone away. The first Windows on ARM iteration was dubbed Windows RT, and it launched on the first Surface tablet. Although this system provided almost every part of Windows, just recompiled for 32-bit ARM processors, Microsoft locked it down using a certificate-based security scheme. Built-in desktop apps, such as Explorer and Calculator ran fine, as did the pre-installed version of Office, but third-party desktop apps built using the Win32 API were prohibited. The only third-party apps that were permitted were those built using the new WinRT API and distributed through the Windows Store.

With few such apps available, Windows RT and Surface didn't see much market success. Nonetheless, Microsoft continued to develop Windows on ARM, as it's an essential part of both the Windows 10 Internet of Things Core variant of the operating system and the Windows 10 Mobile version.

PCWorld offer the following:

Traditional Windows apps can only run on X86 chips, not ARM—thus, the failed Windows RT. To get around this, Qualcomm (and only Qualcomm) is working with Microsoft to emulate X86 instructions, the companies said. [...] Sources at Microsoft and Qualcomm say the partnership is designed around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, a chip that's in production now and is due to ship in the first half of 2017, according to Qualcomm. The first Windows-on-ARM PCs are expected by the second half of next year.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:35PM (#439389)

    The reason to miss that 'wild wild west days' of computing as you put it is because that level of diversity was GOOD for you, both in availability of hardware/software, and in security through diversity.

    Today we have neither. Software has gotten exponentially more expensive despite in many cases having fewer useful features and far dumber and more abstracted DRM (and not in a good way!) Furthermore both architectures you listed now take away MORE control from both the owner and user of the hardware, with few if any benefits to their security. Combined that with the dozen mega companies controlling 90+ percent of the computing market and rather than providing a reliable and cheap computing infradstructure, they are providing you an increasingly unreliable, insecure, and expensive seris of hardware and software options each slightly less palatable than the last.

    I lived through the early 80s and 90s microcomputer revolution. While it had plenty of warts, that diversity was important. If America had as much political diversity as it did computer diversity during that period, maybe the inevitable decline of American civilization wouldn't be happening today.

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