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Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

MS has learned from their experience with Windows on Alpha. Even when they released XP for x86-64, they initially wouldn't sell it at retail for fear that people would get confused and buy the wrong one.

I'm betting they have some compatibility magic cooked up that we haven't seen yet.

Emulation has already been suggested. How about the possibility of having a launch hook that recompiles x86 machine code to ARM machine code? MS is on the short list of companies with the necessary resources to pull that sort of trick.

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Their "magic" is .NET and MSIL.They explicitly stated they aren't virtualizing or emulating x86 code during the session.

The real magic is probably the Windows app store and new app packaging format that are also expected to be introduced with Windows 8. I'd imagine apps will be required to support both ARM and x86.

Right. They have ten years of .NET penetration into the corporate world, the web, and 3rd party application developers - plus four years of .NET integration right into their operating systems.

It is running on everything from embedded systems, to phones, to desktops, to clusters. Throw in that all the hardware vendors who are interested in "the Next Windows" and Microsoft has just laid out a roadmap for the next ten years.

No, they explicitly stated that their demonstration did not consist of virtualized or emulated x86 Windows. That doesn't at all rule out a dynamic translation layer for x86 apps.

Although IBM seems to own them now, it could be the same Rosetta technology that Mac OS X used. The parent company had many public licensees and MS could have been one, but not announced.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit

edit: formatting

Microsoft does have a license to customize the ARM architecture, so maybe they are planning some x86 compat layer. It's an interesting technical challenge but what business problem does it solve for Microsoft? This lets them run Windows on other processor, but it doesn't give them a better mobile platform to compete with iPad, for example.

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