Clemens Vasters

Football. Cloud. Tech. Politics. Pictures. Principal Architect for Messaging/Eventing at Microsoft.

This article here hints at XBox Next running on PowerPC. Of course, the kids over at Slashdot call such a potential move bad names, but that's of course, because they weren't grown up enough when PowerPC was indeed a hot topic for Microsoft and Windows NT. In fact, I may still have a vintage Windows NT/PPC CD somewhere around here.

  • Reminder #1: the NT kernel runs on Itanium, AMD64 and x86 and if Microsoft really, really wants, they can certainly make it go on PPC (again).
  • Reminder #2: Windows NT was born and created on the Intel i860 and MIPS R3000 Risc processors and went to x86; not the other way around.
  • Reminder #3: Xbox runs an NT kernel - stripped down to what's exactly necessary. There is processor dependent code in Windows, but I would assume that the stuff "down there" is a relatively clean place.

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