CES News: Next version of Windows will support ARM based systems

The announcement was made at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division said: "Windows is thriving on x86 platforms today with Intel and AMD and we will continue to see that success in the future. The market and customer reaction to Windows 7 is a good indicator, with Windows 7 running on over 20% of all pcs accessing the Internet, and still more than seven copies are sold each second since its launch in October 2009. Building on that success, Intel and AMD are delivering important innovations on x86 for the future, in areas like graphics and performance, in addition to their new work on low-power systems. Intel's 2nd Generation Intel Core Processor Family announcements and AMD's Fusion APUs announcements at CES are great examples of this continued progress." According to Sinofsky, the x86 32bit and 64bit platforms and Windows, together, provide the capability for even more powerful advancements to emerge at a rapid pace. There will be a number of demonstrations at CES, which will highlight the work done on the architecture of Windows to enable the platform to run natively on the ARM platform. "The underlying architecture and engineering work includes a significant set of capabilities to run natively on ARM across the low level subsystems of Windows as we bring Windows together with this new hardware platform," Sinofsky noted. "Today's demonstration represents the first showing of the next release of Windows. We know many of our most enthusiastic supporters are interested in learning more about the user interface, programming APIs, and other new features to come in Windows. The announcement today is just the start of our dialogue with a broad community around Windows and, as with Windows 7, we will be engaging in the broadest pre-release program of any operating system. So there is a lot more to come."