Intel may have revealed some of Microsoft plans, telling PC World the company will in the future be able t run Windows 8 on phones running on their X86 instruction set.
“… we have the ability to put our lowest-power Intel processors running Windows 8 – or ‘next-generation Windows’ – into phones, because it’s the same OS stack†Paul Otellini, the Intel CEO said.
This statement implied Microsoft intends to run all of their mobile products, including Windows Phone, on the same desktop kernel.
“The plus for Intel is that as they unify their operating systems, we now have the ability for the first time… to have a designed-from-scratch, touch-enabled operating system for tablets that runs on Intel that we don’t have today,” he said.
He also implied these phones will be able to run legacy desktop software, saying:
“Users of these machines expect legacy support in terms of software and peripherals that has to all be enabled from scratch on those [ARM] devices,”
3rd party Windows phone 7 software run on intermediate layers such as Silverlight and XNA, and so are portable easily to ARM, x86, desktop, console or phone, but the real question remains about the user interface paradigm which will easily scale from a small screen to a 10 inch tablet to a 15 inch laptop. Certainly Microsoft has so far implied that they would be developing a separate OS for small screens such as found on phones, with Steven Sinofsky, the president of the Windows division, saying: “[Windows] Phone is uniquely focused on small form factor. Small screen is Windows Phone, and these [tablet] screens are Windows,”
Read the full article at PCPro here.
Via WinRumors.com