Just to clarify, Microsoft has been producing builds of Windows for x86, ARM, and MIPS processors for nearly 15 years. To me, this kind of takes the wind out of the line “Microsoft already has working builds of Windows on ARM”, unless by “Windows” you’re not talking about the family of operating systems but just some specific, non-ARM, consumer, laptop/desktop variant, like “Windows XP”. I mean, even Windows NT supported IA-32, x86-64, Alpha, MIPS,PowerPC, ARM, Itanium platforms. I’m constantly surprised that people are surprised by Windows on ARM, not that Microsoft “will be doing it” but the likelihood that Microsoft has most probably “already been doing it” the whole time and just not SUPPORTING it in the marketplace. It’s also worth remember that Nokia had formed a strategic partnership (for the time being) with Microsoft. Nokia has previously released a netbook and was a founding partner in the MeeGo project, which was targeting a range of applications including handsets (oops, I mean “smartphones”), slates (oops, I mean “tablets”), clamshells (oops, I mean “netbooks”), and embedded (oops, I mean “in-vehicle”/TV). Even though Nokia’s partner, Intel, obviously sees MeeGo as a means to get into all of these applications, it makes me wonder if Nokia was also planning on releasing a lot more than just MeeGo phones. With Microsoft bringing its flagship Windows operating system to ARM and partnering with a company who had a stake in an operating system targeted at all of this applications, I’m wondering if Microsoft is planning on Nokia producing a lot more than just Windows phones.

I wonder what the performance and better life will be like with Windows 8 running on ARM. If this works well then I think this will be a big blow to X86 processors and possibly the start of the ARM revelation.