Microsoft Provides Windows on ARM Details

We've known that Microsoft has been planning an ARM-compatible version of Windows since well before we knew anything else about Windows 8, but the particulars have often been obscured both by unclear signals from Microsoft itself [PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]and subsequent coverage of those unclear signals by journalists. Steven Sinofsky has taken to the Building Windows blog today to clear up some of this ambiguity, and in doing so has drawn a clearer line between the version of Windows that will run on ARM, and the version of Windows that will run on x86 processors.

Up until now, we've operated under the assumption that a new version of Windows called Windows 8 would be released this year, and that it would run on both x86 (32-bit and 64-bit - throughout this article I'll use x86 to refer to both architectures) and ARM processors - Sinofsky's post makes it clear that the ARM version of Windows, officially referred to as Windows on ARM (WOA), is considered to be a separate product from Windows 8, the same way that products like Windows Server and Windows Embedded share a foundation with but are distinct from Windows 7. Windows on ARM has a "high degree of commonality" and "very signigicant shared code" with Windows 8 - much of the user's interaction with the OS will be the same on either platform, and much of the underlying technology we've seen in our Windows 8 coverage so far will be present in both versions, but they're distinct products that will be treated differently by Microsoft.

Countinue here: http://benchmarks.gr/7603/microsoft-provides-windows-on-arm-details/