Taiwanese Vendors on Board for ARM + Windows 8?

This past December, a rumor floated around of Microsoft’s plans to bring its Windows 8 operating system to ARM-based processors, and after seeing what certain vendors at last week’s CeBIT had to say about things, it does look like there’s a good chance it’ll happen.

Tech site ITProPortal attended the German tech event, and in doing so checked in with multiple vendors to ask them a simple question… whether or not they’d consider bringing out ARM-based Windows 8 products. According to the site, the answer was a unanimous “yes”. The reason? Well, there must be potential, and based on the mobile market alone, it’s easy to understand why.

But, an ARM processor is not quite as powerful as a desktop CPU from AMD or Intel, and there’s a reason that ARM processors outside of mobile phones have only really been seen in netbooks or nettops. Even if Microsoft does bring out an ARM version of Windows 8, I am curious to know whether all of our x86 software would work for it out of the box. If not, that’d be a major deterrent, as would be an emulation layer of some sort.

It’s probably way too early to speculate, but if Microsoft does indeed bring Windows to ARM, it’s going to be very, very interesting to see how that goes down in the consumer market, and also with AMD and Intel. In other words, things could get exciting.

The answer was a unanimous yes; like Microsoft, the same firms that have been faithful Intel and AMD partners for years are prepared to explore other territories as soon as Windows 8 will go live. Technically, many big brands are already tinkling with ARM, mostly because they manufacture ARM-based tablets (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte just to name a few) which means that making the jump should not be difficult.