ARM chips will soon run Windows 8 devices. There will be pros and cons such as longer battery live coupled with poor gaming performance.



From PCWorld:

ARM chips are used in 99 percent of the world's cellphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, where they're favored for their miniscule power consumption. However, there are rumors that Apple might switch to ARM for its notebook range, and, in a shock announcement at the beginning of this year, Microsoft announced it was porting Windows 8 to ARM chips in a bid to unify the desktop and mobile versions of the operating system.

This is less shocking than it sounds, and Windows hasn't always been exclusively x86. Windows NT was created to be portable so it would run on DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS chips just as well as it did on x86 (and NT went on to be the basis for XP).

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