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Comment by ramijames | Hacker News Reader

More likely: it will not.

My gut says that Microsoft, at an institution level, can not coordinate and build software at scale because they have two opposing requirements:

1. Legacy software must continue to work

2. Rewriting large swathes of the OS is not in scope

MS will continue to add new paint jobs to the UI, more confusing layers for settings, and other "killer features" like ads in your OS, AI, and search that searches everything but your files until the world moves on to some upstart alternative with less baggage.

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Microsoft has transitioned from 16bit DOS, to 16bit windows, to hybrid win95, full 32bit to 64bit architectures. All with mostly seamless backwards compatibility, this with billions of active users running literally 1000s of different configurations. I would love to know what you mean by ‘inability to build and coordinate software at scale’

And also made it work on IA64, Alpha, PPC and MIPS.

That was a different, much smaller and more agile Microsoft, with a different leadership and MUCH smaller software base. Of all those you mentioned, the 32bit to 64bit architecture would be the most relevant but even that was almost two decades ago and there was hardware support for existing programs to keep working (and Windows 32bit programs are still released and used to this day).

Keep in mind that the problem isn't having Windows build and run on an Arm chip - they already have that - but having all existing programs keep working as they did on the new chip without any perceived loss of functionality and performance.

And aside from Microsoft, i do not see Intel and AMD to stay still and go "oh well, it was nice while it lasted".

IMO of everything mentioned in the article, the most realistic option is for Microsoft to have the next Xbox use ARM chips instead of x86 as they'll have little existing backwards compatibility concerns (and can always benefit by selling existing games again for a new console :-P).

> Of all those you mentioned, the 32bit to 64bit architecture would be the most relevant

It's worth remembering that Dave Cutler was in charge of that transition. He's widely viewed as one of their best.

Dave also worked on the initial Azure platform in 2008.

Also Windows NT and XBox One.

If Microsoft had a high profile project, until he retired, Dave was the go to guy to lead it.

They already have a good-enough Rosetta-like x64 -> ARM translation layer. You can run any x64 windows program on ARM windows. They can optimize the performance more, but that’s not a whole-company effort, a small dedicated team can make the optimization happen. If Qualcomm or Nvidia start shipping M3-comparable chips I can see it going pretty smooth without large changes at MSFT.

> but having all existing programs keep working as they did on the new chip

Surely not relevant to the vast majority of consumers.

Developers and businesses may have old executables they still use. But those users can buy Intel based PCs.

Isn't that latter category the one Microsoft cares much more about?

But the true backwards compatible think here is x86: afaik up an until uefi took on, x86-64 computers still booted into real mode, so much so that some vendors shipped computers with freedos…

But the music stops when the isa is completely different

There are different tribes within Microsoft, maybe if the Windows kernel team is still functional they might be able to pull it off (I would be surprised if they hadn't the kernel working on ARM all along, and Windows NT originally was a multi-architecture operating system (according to Wikipedia: initially 32-bit x86, DEC Alpha, MIPS and then later PowerPC, Itanium, ARM(!), and 64-bit x86).

If the same people who are now responsible for the Windows desktop are also responsible for the actual tech stuff, then god help us all though ;)

I vaguely remember a version of Windows 10 getting released for RaspPi a few years ago...

Windows already runs on ARM, it’s just not very popular but Microsoft has ARM variants of some of its Surface devices

Edit: From the article: “Microsoft obviously already does Arm-compatible builds of Windows.”

They already did that. Most legacy x86, x64 Windows software runs on the ARM version of Windows 11. Most or all of the OS is written for ARM, remember they basically had that done with Windows RT. What has been missing is good performance. The best Windows ARM devices available now are like low end Intel level devices that then lose more performance through compatibility layers. What's needed is both better CPUs/GPUs (+ drivers for games) and 3rd parties to write ARM software. Even Office has an ARM64 version already.

If Microsoft could backport some of the ARM64 work they did for their Azure platform into Windows 12, it should be a wonderful transition.

A) Most of the OS is portable code (go and look at the list of platforms which Windows NT and later have been sold on)

B) Microsoft's x86 emulation on ARM is surprisingly good (based on my personal experience of running Windows 11 on Parallels on an M1 Mac)

> Rewriting large swathes of the OS is not in scope

Is this impossible for AI to do the majority of the work, then let specialists make it work?

As it stands right now, this instant, AI isn't good enough to do that in a sufficiently automated fashion so as to replace entire swaths of OS code, making that infeasible. I say right now this instant because the state of the art (SOTA) is rapidly evolving, and so it's entirely possible that will be possible by the end of 2024, given how fast things have moved in the 13 months since ChatGPT was released.

What a crazy, absurd take. Windows 11 already runs nearly flawlessly on Arm. I'm running Arm windows right now!

Im not convinced microsoft is capable of doing anything successfully aside from pissing on their userbases shoes while hiring contractors to do all the heavy lifting. Im skeptical that they have the technical expertise to do anything deeper than making a chaotic UI.

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