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Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will run on SoC, what is the technical reason for this being big news?

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closed as off topic by random♦ Nov 15 '11 at 4:32

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The point isn't so much SoCs, but rather that those are usually ARM-based. Windows is available for x86, x68-64 and maybe still IA-64 but no other platforms. Therefore the big news here is that there is a native Windows build including all components and included applications that runs on ARM CPUs which use an instruction set different from x86.

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1. No consumer version of Windows (including Win7) has ever been able to run on the Itanium (IA-64) or ever will be; and the last server version to support it will be 2008 R2. 2. I think you meant x86 on the end there :) – Billy ONeal Nov 15 '11 at 4:24
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