The Santa Clara-based champion of x86 architecture has seen the wind drop out of its sails (and sales).
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The X86 architecture performance is better than other available market products while ARM is known for its power conservation.
As part of that plan, today Microsoft is making the Windows Embedded Standard 8 community technology preview (CTP) available on the x86 architecture.
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As far as specs, he said it runs on x86 architecture, a "highly enhanced" PC GPU (with "almost 2 teraflops of performance, " he added), an unknown amount of local HDD storage, and 8GB of GDDR5 system memory.
The company had thus far been unwilling to build chips based on the rival ARM processor architecture which dominates the mobile space, and insists that its x86 architecture will soon be on par in terms of power efficiency.
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Intel (15, INTC) has all but dispatched Advanced Micro Devices as a serious competitor in computers, and now with its Atom line of tiny, low-power-consumption chips based on the x86 architecture, is moving into netbook computers, mobile Internet devices and a wide range of other consumer gadgets.
Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD - news - people ) as a serious competitor in computers, and now with its Atom line of tiny, low-power-consumption chips based on the x86 architecture, is moving into netbook computers, mobile Internet devices and a wide range of other consumer gadgets.
The move will bring the x86 processor architecture that dominates the PC and server business into direct competition with the ARM-based designs that now dominate the smart phone and tablet industry.
While Sony has wisely adopted a standard x86 PC architecture for the its new game console (translation: developer friendly), the PS3 was driven by incompatible Power PC architecture from IBM.
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The Xbox One's architecture -- equipped with a new x86 CPU -- prevents it from being able to run games designed for the 360's eight year old Xenon processor.
Alternatives like Hitachi's SH architecture have long since fallen out of favor, and x86 is still a non-factor.
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Games may be a problem, as high-end gaming is most likely to exploit ARM architecture hardware extensions, and as such not perform as expected on x86 processors.
The new version of Windows will work with processors based on the ARM architecture from Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments, in addition to x86 processors from Intel and AMD.
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