Ever since Microsoft released the Surface RT, people have wondered whether the company would build an x86 emulator to allow ARM chips to run x86 Win32 applications. One of the reasons why the Surface RT and Surface 2 tablet families ultimately failed in the market is because they could run so little software. Decades of legacy x86 support had made Windows and x86 synonymous in many people’s minds, and a Windows tablet that couldn’t actually run what people thought of as “Windows” software wasn’t terribly useful.
Over the past few years, Microsoft’s mobile business has collapsed to the point of being all but dead. But the firm continues working on Windows 10 Mobile, despite a general dearth of devices that run it. Continuum, a feature that allows Windows 10 devices to connect to external displays and keyboards, essentially functioning like a PC, is still said to be key to any potential uptake of the operating system, but there’s been a major catch — Continuum hardware can’t run Win32 applications and is limited to UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps.
According to Mary J. Foley, that could change by the fall of 2017 with the Redstone 3 update for Windows 10. The discovery was kicked off by this Tweet, from WalkingCat, who found evidence that Microsoft might be working on a hybrid x86-64-on-ARM implementation (Foley confirms that the technology’s codename is Cobalt).
Click to expand...