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Qualcomm Wants a Piece of the PC Market
jfruhlinger writes "Much of Intel's story of the past few years has involved its so far fruitless attempts to break into the smartphone and tablet market. But as it keeps trying, it may find competition on its home turf: Qualcomm, which makes many of the ARM-based chips in those smartphones and tablets, wants to make PCs, too. The advent of Windows 8 for ARM and Android will make this possible."
Just what I can't wait to have, a PC that I can't get any drivers for or put anything but the singular blessed Windows 8 installation it came with on.
I'm sorry, but unless Windows 8 comes with a top-notch emulation platform to run x86 apps, this is dead. As much as I enjoy having an Android smartphone, having a PC running Android is something I DO NOT WANT. The main reasons why people want a full fledged PC rather than a tablet is for certain legacy applications (along with a real keyboard/mouse!) and such. If Linux hasn't been able to succeed on the desktop, then I see no reason why ARM would succeed. Plus, we all know that people are going to be talked out of this by your typical Best Buy salesmen and your average person who /thinks/ they are computer savvy but not really. When looking at a 1.2 Ghz ARM CPU vs a 2.2 Ghz x86 CPU their gut instinct is to go for the x86 even though it might be inferior to the ARM.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
but that's all because the x86 chips just havn't been small enough to be efficient and use little power to keep devices going for a long while.
I wonder why Intel doesn't rip out the x86 decoder from it chips and then write compiler back-ends that directly generate micro-ops.
Since the decoder stage is large and power-hungry, the resulting chips would be faster than any ARM variant while also being much smaller are low-power than Atoms.
Yeah, thats RISC.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It doesn't matter as that turkey is gonna bomb so hard it'll finally make MSFT Bob look good!
Think about it friends, the way to know a thing is to understand it, now why do people buy Windows machines? Why to run WINDOWS programs of course! And guess what don't run on ARM? The 25 damned years worth of X86 Windows programs that everybody buys fricking windows for in the first place!
I can tell you what is gonna happen because i saw a dry run of it last Xmas, a local merchant was selling "Windows tablets!" and it looked like XP, but had in the corner a little "Compact Edition" label. Do you think ANYBODY knew what the fuck that meant? Hell no, they can't keep up with all the Windows versions anyway! So many bought the things and took them home, tried them and when they found they wouldn't actually run WINDOWS programs on a "Windows Tablet" they were brought back EN MASSE. The merchant ended up having to stick a sticker over the Windows part and sell them for a loss as a generic tablet.
And THAT dear children is what is gonna happen with Windows 8, Ballmer is trying to force a cell phone OS onto the desktop which doesn't have touch screens for 99.5% of the units being sold and at the same time fool developers into thinking "Hey if I write for Win 8 i can sell anywhere!" which of course is complete horseshit as X86 and ARM devices are about as different as mopeds and semi trucks. one you have to be ultra light and give a shit about resources, the other? Meh they got multicores and assloads of RAM anyway right?
The only thing that makes sense to me is that Ballmer is hated enough by the engineers they are gonna let the sweaty monkey hang himself by his own stupid ideas, otherwise somebody would have called captain obvious to save the day. Everyone knows since he has been CEO its been one clusterfuck after another with only the fact they brought in the office guys to gut Vista and rebuild it from the ground up into a decent OS keeping them from back to back flops. I mean look at his track record, rushing X360 with a fatal flaw costing billions, Zune, killing playsforsure for Zune market, kin, WinPhone looks to be another WinMo flop, hell i could probably go on all day. Any company that is stupid enough to waste resources on Windows 8 development deserves to fail. the smart money says everyone sticks with Win 7 which will hopefully get the monkey FIRED and bring in someone like Ozzie that has a brain. Lets face it if he wasn't billy's little buddy he'd already be shitcanned, he's cost them dump trucks worth of money trying to be Apple.
Final prediction? Win 8 total flop, win 7 sells like mad as people scramble to keep from getting stuck with win 8, OEMs demand downgrade rights to 7, Ballmer fired. The last one not a sure bet if Billy gets involved but surely another Vista flop will have the board revolt.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Since the decoder stage is large and power-hungry
It isn't. Decoding was a major expense when RISC was invented, but transistors are cheap now. Even on a phone.
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