Computex 2011: Intel Mentions Haswell Will Support "Multiple OSes", But Why?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 31, 2011 4:49 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- CPUs
- Intel
- Haswell
- Computex 2011
I hate that I didn't pull my camera out quickly enough to catch this slide, but Intel's Mooly Eden just mentioned an interesting feature of Haswell. He stated that Haswell will support "multiple OSes". Clearly Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and older Intel architectures have supported multiple OSes, but that was never listed as a feature until Haswell. I suppose this means more than it'll run both Windows and OS X, but what do you guys think Intel meant by it?
I already asked Intel and of course I didn't get an answer, I was just told that it was an astute observation and something we'll have to talk about at a later point in time. I suspect this is a statement about the future of the OS space in mobile computing but I'm not entirely sure what Intel views will be different come 2013. Microsoft will obviously support ARM in Windows 8, but what will Intel support with Haswell that it didn't before? What do you all think?
Mooly also showed off a concept Haswell PC called Nikiski. It's a notebook with a transparent touchpad area that lets you view part of your screen while the clamshell is closed. Check out pics of the concept in the gallery below.
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ojingoh - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
ARM-compiled OSes?hyvonen - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Could be Android. More likely it's Meego. Could be both..kanabalize - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Must be for mobile market....Need to penetrate Mobile market...
davepermen - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
I see windows phone 7 and windows 7 in the bottom most picture.something win8? or really two os' side by side?
and yes, i think about arm-os stuff, too.
jjj - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
I see 2 reasons for them to mention multiple OSes (but none for you to only mention Windows and OS X).1.As we all expect Android and maybe other OSes to scale up,they see this a way to defend their market and Intel thinks it's important to metion it.
2.They might actually lose Apple by then (i hope for some hints about the direction Apple wants to take with it's OSes this month).I'm not gona explain this further,it would take too much time.
jconan - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
I doubt that they'll lose Apple as Apple will still use Intel until it can get the processing capability of ARM up to Intel's current processing power. When comparing ARM processing power to Intel, no rendering farm job or video editing will beat Intel/AMD in this area as X86 is still king even though not as power efficient as ARM. Given time it probably will be.jjj - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
My post wasn't about this beeing a posibility,i was just trying to answer Anand's question but if you bring this up i got to explain why Apple can easily dump Intel.You view things as a matter of performance and that's how Intel tries to argue too buit it's the wrong aproach.
The fundamental question is not what performance each has to offer but what perf the user needs.To Apple it's not impoartant to have more performance than needed .If they can diferentiate themself from everybody else and make more money they'll go ARM.There are a bunch of other factors that impact a decision like this,such as cloud, but a major one is software and the need to unify their OSes (for obvious reasons) and that's easier to do when you have similar hardware in all devices.
tdtran1025 - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
I totally agree with jjj in this aspect. About performance. isn't the iPad2 already beat the entry level MacPro by many magnitudes in transcoding video in H.264. Besides, it would not be difficult for Apple engineers to scale as many ARM+PowerVR as the market will bear, and reintroduce it in the XServe form.Apple has conquered the world market in iPhone and iPad devices. They will ride the tide and refocus on server market soon–they have the money to do it now. Besides, it is a natural progression once the transition to unified iOS is complete. Oh, how I hate monopoly!
Guspaz - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Well, consider a few of the operating systems that tend to come to mind:Windows (and WP7)
Linux (and Android)
OS X (and iOS)
FreeBSD
Now, let's see which of these either already or will soon run on ARM:
Windows (WP7 now, Win8 later)
Linux (and Android)
OS X (iOS, not desktop)
FreeBSD
I'd say that ARM's platform support ain't half bad. Out of my list, they've got (or will have) everything but desktop OS X.
Ammaross - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Of course, there's the less obvious answer that "multiple OSes" means it can run a Windows (8 presumably) OS and a front-display Android (or the like) OS simulatenously. Think of it as running 2 VMs, but without a hypervisor....