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  • ojingoh - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    ARM-compiled OSes?
  • hyvonen - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Could be Android. More likely it's Meego. Could be both..
  • kanabalize - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Must be for mobile market....

    Need to penetrate Mobile market...
  • davepermen - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I see windows phone 7 and windows 7 in the bottom most picture.

    something win8? or really two os' side by side?

    and yes, i think about arm-os stuff, too.
  • jjj - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I see 2 reasons for them to mention multiple OSes (but none for you to only mention Windows and OS X).
    1.As we all expect Android and maybe other OSes to scale up,they see this a way to defend their market and Intel thinks it's important to metion it.
    2.They might actually lose Apple by then (i hope for some hints about the direction Apple wants to take with it's OSes this month).I'm not gona explain this further,it would take too much time.
  • jconan - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I doubt that they'll lose Apple as Apple will still use Intel until it can get the processing capability of ARM up to Intel's current processing power. When comparing ARM processing power to Intel, no rendering farm job or video editing will beat Intel/AMD in this area as X86 is still king even though not as power efficient as ARM. Given time it probably will be.
  • jjj - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    My post wasn't about this beeing a posibility,i was just trying to answer Anand's question but if you bring this up i got to explain why Apple can easily dump Intel.
    You view things as a matter of performance and that's how Intel tries to argue too buit it's the wrong aproach.
    The fundamental question is not what performance each has to offer but what perf the user needs.To Apple it's not impoartant to have more performance than needed .If they can diferentiate themself from everybody else and make more money they'll go ARM.There are a bunch of other factors that impact a decision like this,such as cloud, but a major one is software and the need to unify their OSes (for obvious reasons) and that's easier to do when you have similar hardware in all devices.
  • tdtran1025 - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link

    I totally agree with jjj in this aspect. About performance. isn't the iPad2 already beat the entry level MacPro by many magnitudes in transcoding video in H.264. Besides, it would not be difficult for Apple engineers to scale as many ARM+PowerVR as the market will bear, and reintroduce it in the XServe form.
    Apple has conquered the world market in iPhone and iPad devices. They will ride the tide and refocus on server market soon–they have the money to do it now. Besides, it is a natural progression once the transition to unified iOS is complete. Oh, how I hate monopoly!
  • Guspaz - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Well, consider a few of the operating systems that tend to come to mind:

    Windows (and WP7)
    Linux (and Android)
    OS X (and iOS)
    FreeBSD

    Now, let's see which of these either already or will soon run on ARM:

    Windows (WP7 now, Win8 later)
    Linux (and Android)
    OS X (iOS, not desktop)
    FreeBSD

    I'd say that ARM's platform support ain't half bad. Out of my list, they've got (or will have) everything but desktop OS X.
  • Ammaross - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Of course, there's the less obvious answer that "multiple OSes" means it can run a Windows (8 presumably) OS and a front-display Android (or the like) OS simulatenously. Think of it as running 2 VMs, but without a hypervisor....
  • duploxxx - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    looking at the design of win8 and for example the new introduced Xen hypervisor client this is already available in SNB laptops, so interesting to know what Intel wants to do more...
  • ajcarroll - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    that hosts a desktop OS (Windows / OSX) along side a touch OS (Android/iOS) but with
    CPU level support to make things more efficient....
  • setzer - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    yeah, that is my idea also
  • ahmedz_1991 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Bingo ! right there
  • setzer - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I think Intel is just thinking of bringing the hypervisor completely to the masses, as in running an OS along side another OS. Think blue stacks that allows android in windows, now that in hardware (with some software magic).
  • BioTurboNick - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    This makes the most sense to me. It would be a step forward in computing--being able to run Windows, Linux (and OSX?) side-by-side simultaneously and natively without rebooting would be phenomenal.
  • aegisofrime - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I see Intel putting a translator into Haswell, that will enable it to support ARM compiled OSes. Rather much like the Transmeta Crusoe I guess. Coupled with their targeted shift towards lower TDPs, I see Haswell being used in the mobile sector as well.
  • Spivonious - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Yeah, I think that ARM emulation is what they're talking about.
  • JasonInofuentes - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    +1 Could they even stuff an ARM core in the spare space?
  • hf2046 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I also think it'll be some sort of ARM emulation - perhaps Intel is experimenting with implementing the ARM instruction set with existing microcode...
  • out_of_step - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Could be an embedded hypervisor.
    Don't know where the control domain would sit though ...
    Or maybe iOS on Haswell?!?!
  • Targon - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    If you look at the overall environment over the past few decades, the trend has been that hardware makers will support PC/Windows on one side, and then there has been a bit less support on the MacOS side. Linux has generally gotten support only from AMD/ATI for graphics drivers, and from NVIDIA.

    So, what if Intel has decided to try pushing optimizations for Intel processors and graphics on the Linux side of things for their new chips?
  • Chaki Shante - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Intel's still supporting/promoting MeeGo even though Nokia went away (and may be even more now that Nokia dropped).
  • liveonc - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Will Intel enable emultation of ARM on their chips or is it possible to have both x86 & ARM switching between these like switching between IGP & discrete GPU? If switching between ARM & x86 is possible, will it run both ARM &x86 OS', or be able to run ARM & x86 OS' & ARM & x86 software while running on a different OS? If this is possible, will Windows 8 also sell OS's that run on both?
  • StormyParis - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    and are prissily striking back in their PR.

    The one success of Intel outside of Wintel is servers with Linux. Given the state of desktop Linux after years of trying, I wouldn't bet on it, aside from Android.
  • Rigan - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Android is my guess as to what they are talking about. There is no reason for them to worry with support for "arm compiled" software, nothing about the android could not be compiled and run on x86 hardware. We just learned a month ago that Google TV was always an android underneath, it's my bet that Chrom OS is also an android box, but just built on intel hardware. Give Google another year to pull the Chrom OS changes back into the core android platform and they will probably admit to this.

    About intel building an x86 that can pretend to be an arm, that is very hard to believe. I also don't see why they would bother. They have chips that can do nearly everything an arm can do, better. And they are clearly hot in the middle of making them small and power efficient enough to fit in the mobile market.
  • marraco - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    It probably means some way of virtualization.
  • AmdInside - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    OS/2 is going to make a comeback? Perhaps BeOS
  • FullHiSpeed - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    nothing new - Marketing Hype
  • falacy - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link

    Wouldn't it be interesting if Intel made a processor that is essentially an ARM processor with an x86 co-processor?

    The OS could run in the more efficient ARM code base and only utilize the x86 core when an application requests to run x86 code. You could then have a nifty dual core ARM processor to run your daily activities and when extra processing power is required, the OS and hardware are able to fire up the x86 cores and process that code seamlessly.

    Seems weird, but I think it could work really well.
  • Comdrpopnfresh - Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - link

    UEFI adopted as the microarchitectural platform's firmware standard and externally accessible QPI interconnects (or other ptp ext communication link).
    With windows 8 running on soc and arm in addition to x86 in 2013 it would make sense to provide a flexible platform to capitalize on EFI's cpu independence so soc and x86 hardware can be used within the same device, instead of choosing low power or competent performance in the split device market we have today.
    Thin/light or tablet form factor systems will execute/run a single, shared win8 environment in either soc or x86 hardware processing modes, with the QPI capabilities preserving software portability between modes and also allowing system resources to be used by both sets of hardware. The support of both, or either features in Haswell will make for an explosion of diverse device configurations and leaps in functionality.
    I imagine a laptop that instead of going to sleep enters a lower powered always-on available win8 mode running on the soc components and provisioning hardware components to allow sideshow functionality and live/cloud connectivity at any time along with windows environment, and full-on traditional notebook performance from the same device.

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