Windows 8 Appears to be Running Happily on ARM CPUs

At CES 2011, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer showed off an early build of a next generation Windows operating system running on an ARM architecture CPU. This week at Microsoft's MIX Developer Conference in Las Vegas, the company gave developers a surprise Easter egg -- a preview build of Internet Explorer 10 and its underlying version of Windows were running on a 1 GHz ARM processor.

Samsung Electronics (005930), Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN), Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM), NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA), and other ARM chipmakers have all been hard at work cooking up power savvy multicore offerings, which would be perfect for a netbook or notebook.