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Old 09-15-2011, 11:54 AM   #7
Hellmark
Wizard
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: O'Fallon, Missouri, USA
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One thing that you guys need to keep in mind, that with Windows going multi architecture isn't effective unless you have support for it (and I don't just mean from MS). Windows has actually run on processors other than x86 for years, but it wasn't supported by third party companies. For instance, have any of you guys run the 64bit version of XP? Yeah, it blew chunks and you could run very little. It was even worse on the Itanium, PowerPC, Alpha, and MIPS processors. The way that Windows applications are made, they're very much tied into the architecture that they're developed for. For the most part, until very recently, most windows apps were 32bit x86 only. They could run on some 64bit machines, because the AMD64 and x86-64 systems were designed with backwards compatibility in the chips themselves, but there are still quirks and issues however. If you would try to run an x86 executable on a non x86 machine without emulation, even if it is a windows app and you have Windows on the alternative processor, you'll meet failure. Apple, when they switched Motorola to PowerPC, PPC 32bit to PPC64, and also with the switch to Intel, kept things compatible by including some emulation, as well as enabling their tools to include executable code for each of the systems in one binary package (key word here being package, since the apps themselves aren't actually one binary file).

Given how Windows binaries are made, I don't see that as being a likely solution (it is theoretically possible, with a few methods being possible), and many people balk at emulation since it is often slower.

Long story short, Windows on ARM? Big whoop. Come to me when it is actually usable. Android on x86, easy, since apps aren't native to the arch.
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