Windows on ARM: It's a whole new ballgame

Rick Merritt, EETimes
1/7/2011 10:03 AM EST

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Mark January 5, 2011 as the date of the big PC earthquake. That's when Steve Ballmer said the next version of Windows will run on ARM and Jen-Hsun Huang made Nvidia the first chip maker to say it will deliver a soup-to-nuts family of ARM chips for computing.

Old structures have been shaken to the foundations. What will emerge when the smoke clears is still anyone's guess. One thing is certain, all forms of computing from notebooks to supercomputers will see lower power, lower cost versions based on integrated ARM SoCs.

That fact alone has long term repercussions for everything from the emerging tablet market to billion dollar data centers starved for electricity. It will even bring home PCs to modest dwellings that would never otherwise have seen them.

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