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posted by on Saturday June 10 2017, @04:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the patently-ridiculous dept.

Intel may be planning to sue Microsoft for its plans to include x86 emulation in Windows 10 for ARM machines:

In celebrating the x86 architecture's 39th birthday yesterday—the 8086 processor first came to market on June 8, 1978—Intel took the rather uncelebratory step of threatening any company working on x86 emulator technology.

[...] The post doesn't name any names, but it's not too hard to figure out who it's likely to be aimed at: Microsoft, perhaps with a hint of Qualcomm. Later in the year, companies including Asus, HP, and Lenovo will be releasing Windows laptops using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor. This is not the first time that Windows has been released on ARM processors—Microsoft's first attempt to bring Windows to ARM was the ill-fated Windows 8-era Windows RT in 2012—but this time around there's a key difference. Windows RT systems could not run any x86 applications. Windows 10 for ARM machines, however, will include a software-based x86 emulator that will provide compatibility with most or all 32-bit x86 applications.

This compatibility makes these ARM-based machines a threat to Intel in a way that Windows RT never was; if WinARM can run Wintel software but still offer lower prices, better battery life, lower weight, or similar, Intel's dominance of the laptop space is no longer assured. The implication of Intel's post is that the chip giant isn't just going to be relying on technology to secure its position in this space, but the legal system, too.

Also at ZDNet and CRN.


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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday June 12 2017, @05:16PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Monday June 12 2017, @05:16PM (#524509) Journal

    I know organizations that still deal with Visual Basic 6 apps on a daily basis. I tried to migrate them to something newer, but we couldn't find anything they agreed was cheap/easy enough, so the VB6 crap lives on...and now I've started supporting OTHER groups across the country still using this crap because the original devs are long gone. And a few years ago I ran into a company still running Windows 3.1. On a laptop. For their accounting software. I'm sure there's a large number of "business critical" wintel apps that would run just fine on an ARM system because they ran just fine on single core systems a decade or more back and they haven't changed since.

    This isn't for gaming. Most office apps aren't loading a 3GHz quad core to 100% utilization. Plenty of software will run just fine.

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