Microsoft and Qualcomm Collaborate to Bring Windows 10 & x86 Emulation to Snapdragon Processors

Source: Microsoft and Qualcomm Collaborate to Bring Windows 10 & x86 Emulation to Snapdragon Processors

This is a more interesting story than the previous one re: Qualcomm’s server chips running Windows 10. No instead, this article from Anandtech goes into back story, history leading up to today’s announcement. In particular I enjoyed very much the explanation of the migration from Win7->Win10 leading to the “onecore” architecture.

Anyone who has worked with windows os images can plainly see there’s a vast difference in the size of the .wim file from a base level Win7 image to a Win10 image. I’m not joking. My base level smallest Win7 is about 2-2.5 times bigger than the the “install.wim” that comes on a Win10 setup .iso file. And it all has in part to due with the refactoring and re-engineering that went into Win8 to get it to run on ARM cpus (in the form of WindowsRT). Go from Win 8.1, the demise of WindowsRT (with the first gen Surface tablets) and the first, second, third releases of Win10 (now vers. 1607-Anniversary Update Edition) and things have gotten smoother and better I on Intel certainly. I use it in a VM on Oracle VirtualBox, on a 7 year old Dell Laptop, it runs well, smooth, no hitches.

As I was reading this and learning Microsoft had enough flexibility and capability in the onecore architecture of Win10 to allow a port over to ARM with the intent of running x86 (32bit) legacy apps? That I find pretty amazing. I’m very curious to observe which direction things go (Qualcomm’s targeting 2H of 2017 for it’s product launch). We won’t see anything for 6 months at least, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for more announcements.