Microsoft ported Windows 10 and Linux to its homegrown E2 processor architecture

For several years now, Microsoft researchers have secretly been working on a new processor architecture codenamed E2. This research project is a big departure from the chips made by Intel, AMD, ARM, and others. Microsoft's chip architecture uses the explicit data graph execution (EDGE) instruction set and is still very much a work in progress.

Work on the EDGE chips started in 2010 and it's not clear what Microsoft plans to do with it, at the moment there are no plans to put it in production. Interestingly, the software giant did recently port Windows 10 and Linux to its homegrown CPU design. One of the interesting aspects of EDGE seems to be that programs don't need to be rewritten, they just need to be recompiled.

As well as the two operating systems, the US giant's researchers say they have also ported Busybox and FreeRTOS, plus a collection of toolkits for developing and building applications for the processor: the standard C/C++ and .NET Core runtime libraries, the Windows kernel debugger, Visual C++ 2017's command line tools, and .NET's just-in-time compiler RyuJIT.

Microsoft has also ported the widely used LLVM C/C++ compiler and debugger, and related C/C++ runtime libraries. The team wanted to demonstrate that programmers do not need to rewrite their software for the experimental chipset, and that instead programs just need to be recompiled – then they are ready to roll on the new technology.

Further details about E2 and EDGE can be read at The Register.

Aaron Smith demonstrates Linux and Windows running on an EDGE architecture. #isca18 pic.twitter.com/65DuhdhTgQ

— SIGARCH (@sigarch) June 6, 2018