this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Non x86 has been tried at least twice before on windows and failed. While this is certainly the best attempt yet, there is no guarantee of success. Sure would be nice however to get more competition.
The main difference is that Alpha and Itanium came from the high end, where they struggled with low quantities, horrible yields and poor economies of scale.
ARM comes in from the low end, and suddenly the shoe is the other foot. There are more ARM processors in use right now than the number of x86 processors that were ever made in the entire history of computing. They are cheap, they are power efficient, they are everything the market screams for.
The writing is on the wall if Intel doesn’t get its ass in gear and gets substantially better very quickly. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but best case they will remain the king of a shrinking, increasingly irrelevant market until they are acquired.
I was referring to arm and other risc cpus Microsoft has tried before. This is Microsoft's 3rd attempt with arm. The NT in Windows NT literally is a reference to a RISC chip.
NT launched on a bunch of chips, many of them what we would call RISC today. As far as I can tell it was not intended to displace x86, merely to take advantage of the hardware of the 386+ chips and complement the Intel offering with other OEMs.
Alpha (also RISC) was a hot item back in the day, which is why I mentioned it explicitly.
Arm was not part of the deal at the time, but was added later starting with the surface tablets. I have not been counting, but I have no trouble believing it’s the third attempt since surface RT.