I guess I don't feel so bad, considering we've gone on a tangent...
Originally Posted by Electrofreak
ARM and x86 are pretty different however. They employ entirely different hardware and instruction sets, and have a different focus; x86 on maximum performance, ARM on performance per watt. It's a far more difficult to port an x86 app to the ARM platform than it is to port something from Windows to a console like PS3, for example.
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Well...the thing here is that ARM, the PS3 and the Xbox are all RISC processors (The latter two are part of the Power family). But they're nearly as different from each other as they are from something CISC (x86 and a few others).
It's not so much about the difficulty of the port at a basic level but that it was recognized as a thing that needed doing. ARM cpus are/were lower power parts so the code isn't written for them to begin with.
Windows running on ARM is like the PS3's OS running on x86. Everything running on the OS would still have to be recompiled/adapted...though you can probably make it easier in many ways.