Kenny Hemphill
Okay, so it wasn’t actually announced – at least not quite in those terms – but the statement from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, during what was by all accounts a barn-stormer of a keynote speech, that the next version of Windows would run on ARM-designed processors pretty much chucked the PC as we know it onto the funeral pyre.
Like most announcements from large tech firms, it’s one we could – nay, should – have seen coming. On 23 July last year, Microsoft and ARM Holdings announced that the Redmond company had become an ‘architectural licensee’ for ARM’s microprocessor designs. ARM’s share price immediately inflated by 11%. Microsoft’s status as an architectural licensee was one of the few details given after that deal was struck, but it was an important one. Many companies, including Apple, license ARM’s processor designs in order to fabricate their own chips or, in Apple’s case, have a third party do it for them: Apple’s A4 chip, used in the iPad and iPhone 4, is an ARM design manufactured by Samsung. Only Qualcomm, Infineon, Marvell and now Microsoft, however, are architectural licensees. That status gives them access to the full instruction set used by ARM designs, rather than just those instructions that are used by specific processor designs.
At the time, Microsoft said little about what it planned to do with the designs. Now we know: it’s going to design the next version of Windows to run on them. Why? Because it knows that the future is handheld devices, specifically tablets. To go toe to toe with the iPad, however, tablets running Windows will have to have a battery life to compete with that of Apple’s device and offer the same ‘instant on’ capability that enables iPad users to pick up the device and start using it immediately. That, according to Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar, speaking to Bloomberg last year, is something that’s more easily achievable with an ARM-designed chip than an Intel processor.
The desktop version of Windows 7 isn’t designed to run on ARM chips. It’s tied to the Intel x86 platform and is far too resource-hungry, so, logic seemed to dictate that a future Microsoft tablet OS would have to run a version of either Windows Phone 7 or Microsoft’s embedded OS, which is currently used in machines like cash registers. Not so. Microsoft has chosen a third option: to design the full version of Windows to run on ARM.
Why do that when it has a perfectly decent, if underwhelming, mobile OS in Windows Phone 7? Internal politics, according to Charles Arthur in the Guardian: ‘An internal struggle has seen Microsoft’s Windows division, which generates more than half the company’s profits, triumph: Windows Phone 7 licences generate a few dollars per device, where Windows produces about $40. So only Windows will be allowed onto tablets,’ he says.
So, while Apple has one OS that runs on phones and tablets, and another for desktop and notebook computers, Microsoft will have one that runs on phones, and another that runs on tablets, notebooks and desktop PCs. And they’ll all be designed to run on ARM-designed chips.
ARM chips have many benefits, most notably low power consumption and, as a result, low heat generation. That in turn means longer battery life and lower running costs. And while most devices that use ARM processors don’t require the kind of grunt demanded by desktop computers, ARM chips’ efficiency doesn’t mean they lack power. The company has recently targeted enterprise applications such as routers, switches, gateways, wireless access points and Nas drives. It has also recently made moves to enter the market for designing processors that power the kind of data centre servers on which the world is becoming ever more reliant.
As a proof of concept, it currently runs part of its own website on ARM-designed processor cores. And it has, according to reports, been winking seductively at Facebook and Amazon, with a view to persuading them to run their servers on its chips.
There’s no reason, then, why an ARM PC should suffer in raw power terms relative to one with an Intel processor. None of this is good news for Intel, of course. It can, however, console itself that the likes of Google and Yahoo! are likely to rely on its 64-bit chips for their data centres for a while yet.
The irony for Mac users is that in a few years’ time Macs could still be using Intel processors, while PCs will be using chips designed by ARM, a company co-founded by Apple. Hands up who saw that coming five years ago…
