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Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is kind of like the Mark Cuban of chip companies. He’s never been afraid to speak his mind, a fact that was certainly the case at a roundtable discussion with reporters yesterday where Huang stated that he’s confident Windows 8 will be able to run Windows Phone apps.
There’s plenty of evidence to support Huang’s statement. For one, we already know Windows 8 will run on ARM processors. That’s a critical piece of the puzzle, since it’s the architecture utilized by Windows Phone handsets. Next, there’s the fact that Windows Phone apps and games are largely built using Silverlight and XNA, both of which are right at home on the desktop as well.
Then there’s the new AppX package that will help power the Windows Store. AppX manifests allow developers to create a single package that can deploy specific versions of an app to different architectures and operating system versions, and its packages are strikingly similar to those currently used to deliver Windows Phone 7 apps.
Rounding things out is the fact that Microsoft is known to be working at unifying the user experience across its three main platform: desktop, mobile, and the living room (Xbox 360). Allowing apps coded for one Microsoft platform to run on the others as well would simplify the development process — and that simplification would no doubt be welcomed by developers.
And haven’t we also heard rumblings about the successor to the Xbox 360 running an ARM-based processor as well? That would make things even more interesting, since it would deliver a truly code-once-play-everywhere experience.
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