Mysteries are interesting in IT, they lead to a lot of speculations, and finally, when the official info gets revealed, you’re astonished of not thinking at that variant from the beginning. So let’s have it with the latest Microsoft-ARM licensing deal for using the ARM architecture for future Microsoft products.

    As usual, the complete terms of the deal were not made public, which made people speculate what Microsoft wants from ARM (and vice versa). So here are a few options that arise from this deal:

    • Window Phone 7 Series could power ARM slates and tablets
    • Windows Embedded Compact could get the ARM treatment
    • Microsoft wants to port fully fledged Windows versions to ARM in the LongARM project (not possible right now)
    • And the craziest of them all is that Microsoft is planning on using ARM inside its next gen Xbox console