Maybe not cellphones but It would be just fine netbooks, tablets, or umpcs. What kept Windows tablets from being adopted in the past was a super high price tag for tablet pcs. If user friendliness was such an issue well Windows wouldn't control 90% of the operating system market.

That DosBox uses, in case you didn't notice.

The only thing that could potentially make emulation usable is to do higher level emulation, but I doubt that would make stuff like MS Office usable.

By the way, MS Office is full of x86 assembly code.

Since when?

How do you know that?

I just skimmed through the 1st and 4th page of this, but it looks like none of you have considered the hardware angle: ARM has built their processors for low power (highest MiPS/FLOPS per watt) whereas Intel has, until the Atom, built their processors to be performance machines (highest MiPS/FLOPS per MHz). These are, generally speaking, opposite ends of the spectrum the same way as a Prius will never compete with a Corvette.

You could make a similar argument for the PowerVR architecture vs NVIDIA or ATI/AMD's. The catch here is that graphics is very directly a function of how many pipelines you can get onto that die and horsepower is king, period. A smaller display may get you out of having to compute as much, but once you get to notebook/laptop display size you need a certain amount of graphic horsepower, period.

Back to Cortex vs Atom, it IS true that M$ is trying to put everything into the cloud, with all the (dis)advantages that entails. Of course, the biggest disadvantage right this moment is lack of bandwidth and until 4G becomes reasonably priced (5GB allowances at 10+MB/s is BS, as was pointed out recently) and/or public wifi becomes *EVERYWHERE* (fat chance) cloud computing on the mobile platform is doomed to fail.

Since May 2009, when I took over the packaging.

Remember the excel bugs that appeared not many years ago:
http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/20...cel2007Bug.pdf
Virtually all of the core logic in excel is written in assembly.

Ok, now I am totally confused. If DosBox uses code translation, rather than interpretation, then why is it so slow? With [proper] code translation, I would expect average speeds around 1/10 of the speed of an X86 CPU at the same frequency or so. But in my observations, DosBox is much, much slower than that.

And it allows them to run their favourite viruses.

Spot on, and even more importantly, if you stripped the batteries and electric power from the Prius, it would still fail performance-wise, and if you bolted on batteries on the Corvette, it wouldn't suddenly drop close to Prius level mpg. Having said that, one has to know that automotive analogies are usually flawed when used in computing

Do you guys think it will run OpenGL 1.4/2/3 like a desktop, or OpenGL ES like a phone?

Anybody forget something?

How is windows 8 going to run on ARM and still support previous code?
I mean, as far as I know, there are many software for the Windows XP which haven't been ported to Windows7 simply because Windows7 can easily run it.

It seems near impossible for Windows 8 running on ARM architecture to support Windows7, nevermind Windows XP, software (x86) and still perform relatively well (VW's work but currently its so slow it is useless).