Windows 7 to gain support for ARM chips?
updated 01:15 pm EDT, Fri May 1, 2009
Windows 7 on ARM chips?
Windows 7 may eventually be capable of running on ARM processors, suggests the company's CEO, Warren East. The operating system is expected to become common on netbooks, a consequence not only of new features such as touch support but lower system requirements than Windows Vista. Windows has so far, however, been almost exclusively limited to processors based on Intel architecture, blocking ARM's mobile-oriented CPUs.
East notes though that Microsoft touts Windows 7 as working "on a broader array of hardware than any other release of Windows at launch," and that the company will inevitably be important to the netbook industry. "Perhaps there will be support in future," says East, "but that's really for Microsoft to comment on and not for us to comment on, I'm afraid." The first release candidate of Windows 7 was recently released to developers, without support for ARM chips.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Feb 2008
awesome!
This would be great for the future... Right now, even highclocked 1.0Ghz ARM Cortex-A8 chips probably wouldn't be that great of experience with Win7, although later in the year manufacturers should be shipping dual-core and even quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processors and these will definitely handle Win7.
Also, don't forget that although the linux kernel and a lot of linux software already runs on ARM, Canonical is creating a version of Ubuntu optimized specifically for Cortex instruction set and should be blazing fast even on a Cortex-A8, not to even mention 1-1.5 Ghz dual-core Cortex-A9.