port or wine

So, do never ignore the amount of energy a PC can consume during it's lifetime.
the joke is that while everybody is on the PC manufacturers back to reduce power consumption, nobody get on Microsofts back for bringing out a Windows version that require a much more powerful (i.e. much more power hungry) PC.

Erik

So, do never ignore the amount of energy a PC can consume during it's lifetime.
the joke is that while everybody is on the PC manufacturers back to reduce power consumption, nobody get on Microsofts back for bringing out a Windows version that require a much more powerful (i.e. much more power hungry) PC.

Erik

But people are. That is why we talk about M$ Windoze.

I figure they already have the next two generations of Windoze ready and waiting until a processor manufacturer will be able to release something that will at least let the behemoth crawl.

The funny thing is that sometimes people are asking me why a web service or a program is running so lightning fast, and I answer: Because I'm running it on a sub-GHz 5-10 year old machine with Linux or BSD.

If you ignore speed (and the possibility of connecting hardware devices), then almost any processor can emulate a Windows machine.

You can add many gigabyte of RAM on a C51 and the C51 is Turing-complete so it should be able to solve any computation problem given enough time.

The power needed by a C51 isn't so high, but the amount of energy needed to just start a Windows application would be high, because of the very long time it would take.

In the end, even a multi-GHz C51 would have to fight a lot to just manage to load Notepad. Every 32-bit x86 instruction would require a large number of 8-bit instructions, and the lack of a real stack and pointers would force the C51 to swap data in/and out madly.

Since people do like to try strange things just to see if it is possible, it isn't totally unlikely that someone someday decides to try. Most x86 instructions are quite easy to emulate by a C program.