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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to here the inside story here.

Based on my experience with Win7 and Win8, I expect that Win10 would have crawled (or not at all worked) with the slower CPU and smaller memory.

My guess would be that the Raspberry Pi 2 is, in fact, a Microsoft initiative rather than an RPi Foundation initiative - and that Microsoft have actually contributed significant funds to make this possible. Either way, that is good for the community - I don't have a problem with Microsoft financing my stuff as long as it does not come with any strings attached (which, I trust the RPi foundation to have insisted on).

Pure speculation, of course - but I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about this deal.

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That makes sense. After all, they were not going to release an RPi 2 until 2017, and now - suddenly - they have a new version with Windows (version) support from the get go! http://www.extremetech.com/computing/186263-raspberry-pi-2-t...

Seems more likely Broadcom have been helpful than MS from what the RPi folk have said. I'd guess that they weren't originally expecting it to be feasible to get what appears to be a custom SoC made.

Note that when the B+ board was designed, they already knew the pinout of the new chip and were leaving space for it.

They seem to say Windows 10 is essentially the embedded version here, so maybe just the core or something. If it was the full desktop version, I'm pretty sure it would struggle on it.

Since it's ARM, you also won't see any of the "full programs" you see on x86 platforms. Just some simple mobile apps.

I don't think it's a "Microsoft initiative". Many RPi competitors have already moved to quad-core Cortex A7 chips, so it's quite predictable. But I'm actually quite disppointed by this move from the RPI Foundation. They should've skipped straight to Cortex A53. Now devs will have to support ARMv6, ARMv7 and a year or two from now ARMv8 as well.

Only if they want top performance.

They mention on the raspberry pi blog that for now, the official userland is going to stay ARMv6, and through this year they will consider how to provide ARMv7 userland if at all.

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