Is the ARM version of Windows 8 imminent?

From InfoWorld: At the Windows Store presentation yesterday, Windows Web Services VP Antoine Leblond mentioned that the much-anticipated Windows 8 beta would arrive in "late February" -- but there's more to the story.

Part of the presentation included a call for developers to submit Metro-style applications to a "First Apps" contest. Winners will be "part of an exclusive group of developers invited to participate in the Store when it first opens." So if you can build a Metro app that knocks the judges' socks off, your app will appear in the Windows Store when the Windows 8 beta ships.

Scratching through the details of the contest unveils a few interesting nuggets.

Developers are expected to use the Windows 8 Developer Preview -- the version you and 3 million other people downloaded a couple of months ago -- to create a Metro app. Developers need to submit the app by Jan. 8. Finalists will be notified on Jan. 15. Here's the interesting part: Finalists must then "update their app to run on a new, confidential Windows 8 build provided by us and resubmit their app before February 3."

Apparently Microsoft plans on shipping a second developer version of Windows 8 -- at least to this small group -- on Jan. 15. While it's entirely possible that the Jan. 15 developer version will only run on Intel hardware, just like the Sept. 13 version that you already have, is there a chance that it'll also run on ARM hardware?

It's deucedly difficult to read the tea leaves. On the one hand, nobody -- at least nobody who's talking -- has ever worked with a version of Windows 8 that runs on ARM architecture. While it's clear that the ARM version of Windows 8 won't run x86 applications, Windows President Steve Sinofsky has said that Metro apps -- the kind being sought in the First Apps contest -- will be able to run on both Intel and ARM architectures, "when you write a Metro-style application, all the tools are there to enable you in any of the languages that we support to automatically support ARM or x86. I think that's the key part of everything that we'll run."

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