As tablets and other mobile platforms begin to rise in sales—predicted to outshine even desktop PCs within the next few years—a lot of hardware and software companies are looking to cash in on this ascending star. Microsoft among them, partnered with ARM in July to start producing chips that can run their titular software, Windows. Currently, Microsoft’s presence in the mobile scene has been extremely minimal with only the Windows Phone 7—which runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

Feelings on where exactly Microsoft will go are mixed, especially in the software department as they don’t quite have the current OS technology to keep up with the capability needs of tablet users combined with the low-power consumption requirements. GigaOM has a good deal of dissection of expectations for us to follow,

If news is coming from Microsoft about Windows running essentially on smartphone chips, it’s highly likely to happen on January 5, 2011 at the Consumer Electronics Show. Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, is scheduled to take the stage for an evening keynote, providing a highly focused audience for an announcement. I’ll be among the crowd, attending live, and until then, I’ll be wondering what specifics Ballmer will mention because this development doesn’t necessarily mean a full-blown desktop version of Windows will be made to run on processors that use the ARM architecture.

The current Windows desktop platform, Windows 7, is far too “bulky” to both exist and run on devices with limited storage capacity, memory and processing power. So it’s possible that a Windows “Lite” version could appear: a platform that provides the most used consumer features only, for example. Or Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 platform, which the company says has created 1.5 million device sales to carriers, could be extended with new features and be slated for tablet devices. I find that unlikely and think the possibility exists that Ballmer will simply tout Windows Embedded Compact: the limited subset of Windows that was shown on tablets earlier this year at the Computex show.

The announcement, as I suspect, will probably be lacking in details. What I expect will be something about end goals and not exactly how they intend to reach them. Perhaps it might include some information on what software the new systems will be running and possibly some gesticulation about what sort of prototypes to expect—and it’ll probably be able a Windows Tablet. Like the reporter from GigaOM, the Windows Embedded Compact seems the brightest shining star out of the bunch, but currently that falls short of other tablets so Microsoft might want to produce something with a lot more bang.

The combination of Microsoft and ARM chips will certainly put them on the same level as other tablet producers, but in the end, Microsoft is a software company. In the smartphone and tablet industry, ARM is going to be the one to beat—making bringing true computational might to mobile devices at low-power requirements.

While they have in the past gone with Intel for most of their software, the silicon industry company doesn’t have much to offer in the way of extremely-low-power as for tablets and other mobile PC platforms. Even the Intel Atom doesn’t provide quite what’s needed. So as a result, Microsoft is probably looking to ARM to shore up that hole in their marketing strategy, even though most of their OSes run so well on Intel x86 platforms. If Intel wants to get back into the game—especially with Microsoft in their corner—they’re going to have to release a low-power chip specifically for tablets that will outshine everything else.

They’re already a powerhouse when it comes to the traditional PC market, so perhaps they’ve got something up their sleeve that we haven’t seen yet.