But there is the Cortex A-15 which puts ARM in the Intel perf ballgame. Not surprisingly, I've heard grumblings for nearly the past decade of an ARM version of Windows in various states of stability. It will be interesting to see how far along this is.
The issue with x86 and clocks had little do with Windows, and more with the Blue Crystal effect (MHz sell CPUs not perf). There's a great insider book about this called "The Pentium Chronicles" by the chief architect of the P6.
And yet, the most popular Windows version couldn't do anything with the dual and quad-processor boxes being sold. Clock number marketing had its share, but the lack of an OS that could run most games or support a lot of the hardware already out (I had a couple gizmos that didn't work under NT) certainly didn't help the evolution of multi-processor x86s. As late as XP-time, most of my friends who were serious about gaming dual booted their boxes between 2000/XP for work and 98 for gaming. For them, a multi-processor workstation would be useless half the time.
For most of 1999/2000, I worked on an IBM PC Server 320 with two Pentium 200 processors and found it was wonderfully "smoother" than the 400MHz P2 (or 3, can't remember that) users who didn't run NT had. I cannot picture myself being happy on a single threaded machine anymore.
> But there is the Cortex A-15 which puts ARM in the Intel perf ballgame
Where "Intel perf ballgame" might mean "within an order of magnitude of Intel's currently shipping ULC chips". A9-based hardware has barely started shipping (as in, hours ago), by the time A15s ship Ivy Bridge will be out. If not Haswell.
The issue with x86 and clocks had little do with Windows, and more with the Blue Crystal effect (MHz sell CPUs not perf). There's a great insider book about this called "The Pentium Chronicles" by the chief architect of the P6.