[Info-vax] RMS intro

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 15:27 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman wrote:

> Microsoft tried to apply pressure to ISVs that had significant Windows
> products to put them onto Windows Phone.

They also I think paid money to makers of Android phones (like HTC) to 
bring out Windows Phone versions of their products. This only highlighted 
the disparity between the inflexibility of their platform, versus the 
versatility of Android.

For example, Windows Phone 7 only ran on a single core. Windows Phone 8 
only ran on two cores--no more, no less. This was when contemporary 
versions of Android could run on anything from a single core up to--I’m 
not sure, there were 4-core, might even have been some 8-core devices by 
that time.

There was an interesting ARM chip (from NVidia? Qualcomm?), used in some 
tablets, that had 5 cores: 4 full-power ones, one low-power one. The 
latter only engaged when the load on the machine was low, when the full-
power cores would shut down.

Linux could handle this dynamic reconfiguration of cores without a reboot; 
the NT kernel could not.