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Intel's Haswell Chips Pushing Windows RT Into Oblivion
SmartAboutThings sends this excerpt from Technology Personalized:
"Intel has started shipping the fourth generation Haswell chips for tablets, which brings power-efficient processors and hence much better battery life to Windows tablets. According to IDG, Intel has now started shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors, including one that draws as little as 4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios. These new Haswell processors could go into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, bringing longer battery life to the devices. This is a great news for Windows lovers, who have had to sacrifice performance for battery life (and vice versa) until now. Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."
"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."
Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?
Free Martian Whores!
From a purely technical standpoint; this makes a lot of sense. Backward compatibility, fewer architectures that devs must target, lower dev and maintenance costs for OS vendors, and so on.
However, I can't say I'm really happy about the idea of Intel gaining even more dominance in the market. AMD is still holding on, but their answer to "low power" is "we can do better graphics than Intel in less power than Intel + dedicated graphics" which is a nice perk but also addresses neither the high end of the PC market (where they can compete on price, but not really on performance) nor the tablet/smartphone/ultrabook end (where they would need at least one and ideally two steps up in manufacturing process to match Intel).
ARM reaching into the tablet/netbook market seemed like a viable competitor; less powerful at its top end than even a mid-range Intel chip, it could operate comfortably in power ranges that Intel had no answer to. Now... not so much, and with the possible exception of legacy devices and really cheap/underpowered computers (RaPis, smartwatches, etc.) ARM risks becoming irrelevant to the "daily computer-using world". I don't care one way or another about ARM in particular, but there should be *something* out there (in reasonable usage) other than x86/x64.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
LOL, remember a time when Intel competitors had to torture their RISC designs to emulate x86 instructions to even have a chance in the marketplace (they all failed anyway)? How does that feel Intel? You don't have a shot in hell for making inroads into the tablet market, especially if you arrive to the ball with an ugly mistress named Microsoft.
"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore." Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?
For the exact same reason people have been using Windows for decades. They want to run specific Windows based software. With these tablets running x86 rather than ARM the legacy x86 applications become usable. Assuming drivers and other factors cooperate.
Off
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
it's probably another reason not to go RT.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore.
Which OEMs would that be? Acer was already out, as are Samsung and ASUS. Does Dell still sell Windows RT products?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The difference hardware-wise between Surface RT and Surface Pro is significant. The RT is still fairly light and easy to carry around. The Pro is significantly larger and heavier due to a larger battery and more cooling capabilities built in, and still has less battery life. In fact, the additional size and weight was sited as one reason why the Pro wasn't any good as a tablet. Cutting the thickness and weight of tablets is not just a packaging and shipping advantage.
The only way for x86 chips to reduce both heat and power consumption on load (because face it, if the processor heats up significantly at max load, an additional cooling system would have to be included in the machine's design) is to cut performance. And given x86's overhead, that'll never truly be able to compete with ARM.
Of course, RT is plagued with numerous software and hardware problems and probably was dead on arrival anyway. But new x86 chips are far from being the reason it hasn't and won't take off.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
That Intel chips become more energy efficient have more implications than giving the last shot to a dead platform that Microsoft killed pretty efficiently already. In fact, could push more into oblivion Windows (RT or not), as could push other ecosystems that could become mainstream where Microsoft don't have presence or meaning at all, like in wearable computing, or pretty cheap devices where it would be better to install some linux derivative than paying the microsoft tax that cost more than the device itself.
Microsoft's policies with the Surface had everything to do with killing RT. They couldn't have better engineered Surface RT to fail if they tried.
Confusing name - identical to a product the same size and shape and not at all the same thing that is released at the same time. WTF?
Inferior screen compared to Surface Pro
Window 8
Missing "Start Menu" being replaced by "Start Button"
No initial boot to desktop
Apps are only available through the market and with a minimum $1.50 charge
No side-loading of apps.
No backwards compatibility
No ability to load anything that isn't approved by Microsoft. All of the disadvantage of Apples walled garden with none of the glamour
Poor CPU choice to begin with
Not enough RAM
Poor heat management
The price was far too high
No ability to join a domain
Can't legally use it for work if you read the license
Metro should have been an option and never a forced interaction
The worst thing of all was that Microsoft blatantly ignored their users feedback about Windows 8!
This arrogance left a bad taste in the mouth of many and word of mouth killed the Surface RT.
Microsoft could have made a killer Surface RT that would have done very well if they hadn't been so arrogant. The attempt to force their "market" and the Metro interface - whatever the consequences killed the Surface. By the time Haswell came out Surface RT was already dead, lost along with a few million missing tablets in a warehouse somewhere.
Here are the specs:
1.7GHz dual core, 64-bit RISC cpu, 1GB DDR3, quad-core GPU integrated... etc
All of that in the new ARM-based "Apple A7" cpu is inside of a damn phone! How many heatsinks and fans do ya reckon are in that iPhone?
Extrapolate all that with your brain head, and think what some GHz scaling with copper heatsinks and fans (etc) could do in a desktop machine? There is not long to wait before we do have laptops and desktops running on RISC architecture again, given these new published specs.
but... but... nokia just announced a new RT tablet. Obviously it was a well thought out idea, it got them.. sold to microsoft.
I think Linux users and Mac users will profit from it as well. Haswell chips have been in the new MacBook Air and a number of other devices, not just "Windows" tablets.
Microsoft marketing FTW.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
They claim 4.5 watts for the low power usage scenario. ARM will be with us for a long time. The ARM folks are climbing the feature/performance curve too. Don't worry about AMD, they are bringing out ARM chips too. Including the ARMv8, aka. ARM64. AMD describes more fruits of ARM embedded partnership
Isn't one of ARM's advantages cost?
A tablet screen is way too small
Not when you dock it. Add an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor to any tablet with Bluetooth and HDMI out, and you can carry one device that shifts between desktop mode when you're at a desk and tablet mode when away from one.
Is Windows-loving legal?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Haswell processors are 11W, not 4.5W. i.e. you still need a fan to cool. SDP is just intel marketing bullshit.
Silvermont is a true tablet cpu though, with tdp around 4W
If the purpose of rt was to get intel to take power consumption seriously then it may well have worked. Battery life was a key differentiator and on ramp for non - windows (ios and android) devices. Getting rid of that advantage strikes me as pretty crucial for the windows camp.
The question is whether or not it's too late to restore hegemony to windows in the tablet space.
Was coming on to say the exact same thing.
The only way to use the tablet interface is to write for WinRT. That includes x86 devices.
Contrarily to what seems to be a popular belief on Slashdot, x86 and ARM aren't the real issue, it's the designs themselves which come from very different backgrounds (large high performance chips where thermals weren't a concern and fans were a given versus embedded processors which had to sip power and hide in small areas). An efficient x86 device is just as possible as a powerful ARM device, and Intel really does have a shot at tablets and maybe even phones. They've been cutting down power usage in a dramatic fashion.
Intel has been making numerous pushes for x86 support in Android (there are x86 images for most if not all Android versions) and also participated in (sadly now defunct) MeeGo. Considering Android is largely based on bytecode applications, I'd even say they're in an excellent position there, since you wouldn't even need to recompile applications for different platforms if the backend is handled properly.
The tablets generally have a touchpad built into the cover and there are always bluetooth options available.
By which time you're carrying so much bulk that the only advantage of a tablet over a netbook is that tablets aren't discontinued.
"the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore"
Why is that not Windows RT now more powerful? Can RT not run on x86?
In the tablet form factor RT is actually the better choice for most people, if only the apps where there to support it. Using legacy apps designed for a mouse environment on a touch interface is a huge compromise of pain.
Intel makes a 5 watt soc and the best thing they can think of to use it for is yet another doomed Windows tablet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Because I was pretty sure Windows tablets were already oblivious.
Is Windows done on ARM? Two words: Windows Phone. So obviously not. Windows on ARM will continue for the foreseeable future. Are Windows RT tablets dead? Well not yet. Who cares about running 7 year old productivity apps. That didn't seem to hamper iPad adoption not being able to run Mac apps. Once you have all of the consumption apps you need from the store, I think ARM RT or x86, it doesn't really matter.
Isn't that like being too ethical?? How can one play too many games??!!??
>However, I can't say I'm really happy about the idea of Intel gaining even more dominance in the market
Same here.. at this rate, Lt. Cmdr. Data and the main computers of the Starship Enterprise will be running on a x86 based design. *sad*
Far as I know.
well The PHB does not see it that way and may even do searchers on the way out for all workers.
also way to much non stores apps out there and to much app store lock down / censorship
> A tablet screen is way too small for Photoshop or a CAD program, and nobody's going to waste a $1000 license (Photoshop) on a tablet.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/05/wacom-companion-hands-on/
Finally Wacom figures it out and even manages to get it right... but as usual overprice the product by 200 %.
You might not be the target market, but artists everywhere have been fantasizing about a real digital sketchbook with decent battery life ever since Apple refused to put real stylus support on their ipads. You'd think the success of the galaxy note lines would have been a honking big clue bat, but apparently they still think fingerpainting is the way to go.
I jumped in with the Asus ep 121 (12 inch screen). It was a bit too bleeding edge at the time for my taste, and the battery life is horrible, but it's excellent for sketching. The new surface tablets are bound to improve on all that.
Bet on Intel/AMD!
Intel has a mountain of money, the various ARM SoC guys have a pretty large revenue stream (though it's fragmented...). Is it reasonable to say that Intel's money they have to devote to pushing their power usage down is large enough to overcome ARM's advantage, or does ARM have some sort of inherent advantage (+ ARM's supporters' money) that will keep them at least at parity?
-Bucky
since you wouldn't even need to recompile applications for different platforms if the backend is handled properly.
I'd say that's a huge "if", given the number of apps that put the "magic" in C shared libraries to make it easier to port to different platforms
-Bucky
I see plenty of "business people" pull out a tablet and use it to make notes during meetings. The fact that it's not ergonomic doesn't matter since all they care about is being hip or something. Having your MS project handy on your tab is enough argument for any project manager to warrant it alone. Since the employer is picking up the tab, a $10 monthly fee for photoshop (not a $1000 price for a static license) isn't a problem either, if they need it for the job. People have allowed ergonomics to go die in a corner since someone thought that laptops would be cheaper than desk top computers for the employer, there is no reason tablets shouldn't replace those laptops either. The decision makers don't care about productivity anymore, they just think that everyone uses computers in the exact same way they do themselves and vendors only advertise shiny new "smaller is better" computers so the sheeple tend to want them as well. You may still want that big dual desktop 30" screen and a computer that will run that real estate effectively, but you're never going to get it since it's not "flexible" enough.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore." Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?
For the exact same reason people have been using Windows for decades. They want to run specific Windows based software. With these tablets running x86 rather than ARM the legacy x86 applications become usable. Assuming drivers and other factors cooperate.
Except that tablets are pushing software away from a specific platform. It's always a tug of war between thick client and thin client, but MS has everything to lose as applications move from the PC to the net (or intranet). In corporations, those applications are moving to the network because it's such a pain in the butt to distribute them to each individual PC. After all, when you update a website, you've automatically updated all of your users.
If those applications follow standards, there's less reason to use expensive Microsoft technology except for the fact that they have such a strong legacy in the business world. Don't get me wrong, I believe that the tablet war is Microsoft's to lose. They have the money to do the same thing they've done in the past: bu their way into the market.
With Windows 8 you don't have a "full PC functionality" but a neutered PC with wannabe-phone-UI. Have you tried to use the Win8 for anything but starting a IE from a Metro tile? Win8 tries to hide all the legacy programs and one has to manually create one-by one the desktop icons for them. The settings are also dumbed down, at least for me it took more time to change keyboard layout and get rid of the annoying mouse gestures in Win8 than to install Debian into the same machine. All this after using previous Windows' for over 20 years and most of it professionally 8 hours a day.
"could draw as little as 4.5 WATTS!!!!! in specific usage scenarios" is entirely made of weasels, including the "4.5 watts" without some solid benchmarking.
This story is entirely press release and is made of air.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
ARM [...] will face very touch competition from things like Moonshot
Moonshot supports both x86 and ARM processors.
Contrarily to what seems to be a popular belief on Slashdot, x86 and ARM aren't the real issue, it's the designs themselves which come from very different backgrounds
There's some truth in that, but a lot is intrinsic to the instruction set.
The first round of RISC vs CISC was won by RISC, because they used very simple instruction decoders, whereas CISC chips had 20-50% of their total die area taken up with the decoding logic. This meant that, for the same transistor budget, a RISC chip could spend a lot more of it on execution units.
Then, as dies became bigger, CISC started to gain because they could do things like divide in hardware, rather than as a microcoded loop, whereas RISC was still expanding the sequence in the compiler or assembler. RISC chips needed to modify their instruction sets to keep up. Those complex addressing modes in CISC chips started to be folded into single-cycle operations as part of the load pipeline, whereas the RISC equivalents were sequences of operations with lots of pipeline dependencies between them. Most of the surviving 'RISC' architectures (e.g. PowerPC) were quite CISCy by this point.
Then CPUs got faster than memory and so instruction cache pressure and so the variable-length instruction encoding became a benefit because instruction cache misses became very expensive and so having a smaller instruction cache with the same miss rate meant that you could have more execution units for the same transistor budget. The size of the cache became greater than the size of the decoder as time went on.
So why doesn't this apply to ARM? First, ARM has managed to keep their instruction set simple and orthogonal (so very cheap to decode), but also very expressive. All memory operations have a register, an immediate offset, and a shift, so you get quite complex addressing modes without needing a complex decoder. Thumb-2 is a variable-length instruction set, but a very simple one (instructions are all 16 or 32 bits, with a cheap way of distinguishing them) and one designed to make the instructions that compilers commonly emit shorter. It gives similar code density to x86, but with a much cheaper decoder.
Why does the decoder size still matter? Because the decoder is one of the only parts of the chip that has to be powered all of the time[1]. The name of the game today is trying to turn off as much of the CPU as possible. Power consumption per transistor has not been dropping nearly as fast as transistor densities have been increasing, so if you want to stay within your thermal envelope then you get more transistors to play with each generation, but you can power a smaller subset of them at any given time (this is called the Dark Silicon Problem by those in the industry).
Many of the tricks that Intel can do involve having a complex decoder and then a reordering and micro-op fusion sequence in their pipeline. These give a significant performance advantage at the high end, but also place a lower bound on their power consumption. Newer additions, like hardware transactional memory, come at a similar power cost: HTM requires a lot more logic in the cache controller, which means more always-on power consumption. It will probably give an overall performance/Watt advantage when the CPU is under full load in a large multicore setup, but in a single-socket system with moderate load you'll end up burning more power.
It's quite telling that the power consumption figures for Haswell, for a 1.5GHz single-core chip are in the same ballpark as a 1.5GHz quad-core Cortex A15 SoC (including 72-core nVidia GPU, under load).
[1] In tight loops, high-end Intel chips will power gate the decoder and just read from the micro-op cache, however the micro-op decoder is still powered and is about as complex as an ARM decoder.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, but Haswell is not going to be available in a $20 SoC.
Atom might be, but that's not Haswell.
And Windows apps on a touchscreen are just awful unless you have a mouse and keyboard - by which stage you might as well have bought a laptop.
Windows RT was actually a better attempt at making a tablet running Windows that was nice to use. Problem is, the market doesn't want Windows-Tablet, it wants Windows. On a laptop. Or Android/iOS on a tablet.
Intel has no interest in selling its low power Haswell chips that still barely break 10watts for $10 per chip like the Tegras or Snapdragons sell for! Intel will never want its core market CPU/SoC at $10. EVER!
This puts Windows RT front an center still for the future. I can't believe how many tech articles are written under the belief that Windows RT was anything other then a long term plan for the future. MS lost big time to Apple because they didn't have an ARM compatible OS ready to go on the best big wave, they wont make that mistake again even if they have to wait another decade to see what the next big wave is.
Apple will continue to work on their own designed 64bit ARM SoC chips, they have just begun, why pay Intel all that money for something they can pop out at at less them $10 a pop them selves?
I agree. I'm old enough to remember when computing was almost synomymous with IBM. But right now Intel has more influence on the comuting landscape than IBM ever had in the 60s and 70s.
Intel has a problem, however, right now their advantage is their semiconductor process, but somewhere between 5 and 10nm, progress will become slower and they won't be anymore a generation ahead of everybody else. At this point the exceedingly baroque x86/x64 architecture will no more be able to hide the cost of the legacy against a modern, clean design, throuh process advantages.
But none of the existing architectrues is a clean one in my opinion (not even the dead Alpha), not ARM, not MIPS, not Power, not Sparc, and much less Itanium.
In the modern world, we don't judge.
That is both RT's advantage and its failure. RT was a product released far too early. If they had waited until the new OS had a software ecosystem and people were actually using it, the inability to run all the malware of the past would be a big advantage if users didn't need any other legacy software. Windows RT would be the Windows that works and keeps working. The worst thing about it was that it came out when it did. In another year from today, it would probably be a success that would give Microsoft a device with a real chance to beat Apple and Google in their market segment.
This puts Windows RT front an center still for the future. I can't believe how many tech articles are written under the belief that Windows RT was anything other then a long term plan for the future. MS lost big time to Apple because they didn't have an ARM compatible OS ready to go on the best big wave, they wont make that mistake again even if they have to wait another decade to see what the next big wave is.
Why is that? One advantage of RT were that it had a longer battery life using ARM compared to x86. Now Haswell won't match ARM in terms of efficiency but it will bring up the battery life to a usable number of hours for the average person. First gen Surface Pro had 5 hours of battery which is not enough for full day of work. If it brings it to 8 or more, then what advantages of using RT will there be?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
>They want to run specific Windows based software.
Nope.
They want to use computer to surf the net, send email and write simple documents sometimes. And they want their hardware "to just work"(tm). Windows does that perfectly, and it comes with the computer.
This puts Windows RT front an center still for the future. I can't believe how many tech articles are written under the belief that Windows RT was anything other then a long term plan for the future. MS lost big time to Apple because they didn't have an ARM compatible OS ready to go on the best big wave, they wont make that mistake again even if they have to wait another decade to see what the next big wave is.
Why is that? One advantage of RT were that it had a longer battery life using ARM compared to x86. Now Haswell won't match ARM in terms of efficiency but it will bring up the battery life to a usable number of hours for the average person. First gen Surface Pro had 5 hours of battery which is not enough for full day of work. If it brings it to 8 or more, then what advantages of using RT will there be?
LOL, You stript out the the reason your self that RT is important. Because you can ship a complete computing device with a $10 SoC/CPU instead of something Intel will want normally x 10 more amount of money.
Everyone likes to think their not cheap but all to often they are, x86 = expensive device. RT = cheap priced device that will eventually do everything you want. There are competing ARM SoC makers pushing now multi Ghz chips at around $10, Apple have their 64bit ARM chip now, and it will only get faster. The days are gone where every geek should worship Intel CPUs as some kind of unreproducible holy grail, its just not the case any more and any advantage is slipping fast. Apple has made so many billions because it was able to cut margins that Intel would normally want to take.
You can't stop that hungry beast that makes companies want more for them selves.
Chances of someone buying tablet to want some 20+ years of age accounting application on it = NaN, a few...
it surely will pay off!
NOT!
Because costing less doesn't trump backwards compatibility for Windows users. If you are getting an ARM CPU, you have three choices. High end iOS with lots of wall gardened apps. Middle and low end Android with fewer but plenty of apps. Or RT which had the high price tag of iOS and much fewer apps than either. RT can't run old Windows x86. Add to that MS choice to price RT really high. Hence $900M writeoff and current discounts. If Surface 2 is priced with iPad, someone at MS needs a dose of reality.
The sad fact is no one wants RT when they can get iOS or Android. If they want x86 compatibility, they'll get Surface Pro. They'll pay more for that advantage.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Can someone explain why Haswell is 4th generation Core-i? By my count, it's either 3rd, or 5th. It's third if you count architecture, or 5th if you count both architecture (tick) and die-shrink (tock).
Nahalem - Westmere - Sandy Bridge - Ivy Bridge - Haswell
The only way Intel's counting scheme makes sense is if you lump Nahalem and Westmere together as 1st gen, SB is 2nd, and IB is third; which makes no sense.
GG
The Haswell chips are considerably more expensive than ARM, so there could be a market for less expensive RT devices. But there probably won't be, because Android and iOS already occupy that space.
... how it could be so quickly forgotten.
Windows8 RT was an attempt to cash in on the cheap end of the tablet market, and failed on price and over-supply.
When the "all new, all singing, all dancing" netbooks came out, supplied with Windows 7 Starter, you were supposed to pay for a upgrade to "real Windows 7". ... nobody wants it, because nobody wants to pay more just to be able to run some limited software on it.
RT is suffering the same fate
Android on Arm would be the smartest thing manufacturers could do, if they can "shoe-horn" Android onto those megalithic M$ tablets.
Me? I installed OpenSuSE with xfce on the two netbooks I got cheap at the "end of model" sales. I dual-booted the first one I bought : it had WinXP, and I was keeping that.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
"4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios"
Like in the off scenario.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."
Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?
A better question would be - why would a manufacturer buy an OS for a platform that doesn't support the existing base of applications for that OS? The only reason anybody would buy a Windows anything would be to run Windows apps that they have. But if they can't run it, then what's the point?
The Android/ARM argument is tangential - the reason Android is preferable to RT is that Android has the same dominance in the bulk of applications for portables - be it phones or tablets - that Windows has on desktops or laptops.
I didn't talk trash about Alpha. I just said (or tried to say) that an Intel processor and an Alpha processor both having the same clock speed will have unequal power (in that case, the Alpha would be slower). But the Alpha processors had much higher clock speeds than Intel chips of the day. In other words that wasn't a valid way to compare performance.
That's not a valid comparison, given that at the time, a Pentium was superscalar while an Alpha was superpipelined. It also depends on what you are comparing - like a Pentium II 200MHz vs an Alpha 21064 200MHz would give you one thing, while the same Pentium II 200MHz vs an Alpha 21164 200MHz would definitely show the Alpha as faster.
But it's not a valid comparison if the Pentium had more pipelines than the 21064. Would it be valid to divide the Pentium's benchmarks by the number of pipelines more that it had in comparison to the Alpha? Also, today's i7s, for instance, are 4 core or 8 core - should their performance be divided by 8 while comparing to an Alpha?
Because costing less doesn't trump backwards compatibility for Windows users. If you are getting an ARM CPU, you have three choices. High end iOS with lots of wall gardened apps. Middle and low end Android with fewer but plenty of apps. Or RT which had the high price tag of iOS and much fewer apps than either. RT can't run old Windows x86. Add to that MS choice to price RT really high. Hence $900M writeoff and current discounts. If Surface 2 is priced with iPad, someone at MS needs a dose of reality.
The sad fact is no one wants RT when they can get iOS or Android. If they want x86 compatibility, they'll get Surface Pro. They'll pay more for that advantage.
Sure you can look at it that way but MS ultimately are abount pleasing their share holders, so they are ultimately about maximizing the amount of money they can make. If they can emulate Apple by even 30% success as Apple have done over the last 4 years thats going to be as much as 30 billion dollars in net profit they could have in the bank. Its all about trying and trying again.
Sure you can say they are too late to do that but MS would argue they owe it to their share holders to try, RT doesn't cost them that much at the end of the day and on a long enough time line even going at it is it will probably become profitable for them. This leaves the door open in the murky future for any possible big hit device.
Apple made a lot of money by "popping" up a new software/os platform despite the mass consumers addition to MS Windows. Microsofts style is to just keep plugging away at it until they get their software right. MS would much rather keep plugging away at it and and the end of the long road have success with a cheap ARM SoC backend that costs $10 then an Intel chip that Intel would like to sell for $200.
Chances of someone buying tablet to want some 20+ years of age accounting application on it = NaN, a few... it surely will pay off! NOT!
Who said 20+ year old software. "Legacy" is simply the stuff they are already using. For example in the accounting realm you mention it might be quickbooks pro, a windows only app. The plain quickbooks that is supported under windows and mac is missing some business related features. A tablet that can run people's/company's existing Windows applications would be something quite different from what we've seen so far. As to how popular this feature would be ... notice that Apple doubled the sale of Macs once they switched to Intel CPUs and their machines became capable of running (Boot Camp) Windows or emulating Windows at a reasonable speed (PowerPC based Macs were too slow, the Intel CPU architecture had to be emulated).
>They want to run specific Windows based software.
Nope.
They want to use computer to surf the net, send email and write simple documents sometimes. And they want their hardware "to just work"(tm). Windows does that perfectly, and it comes with the computer.
Wrong. Linux based PCs were also available at various retail channels (even Walmart tried it) and few cared, people wanted Windows because it ran the apps or games they were interested in.
RT doesn't cost them that much at the end of the day and on a long enough time line even going at it is it will probably become profitable for them. This leaves the door open in the murky future for any possible big hit device.
$900M writeoff isn't that much? That's not the total loss from RT by the way. That's just what MS reported as losses in unsold inventory. Total losses might be closer to $2B when you account in marketing/advertising as well as net losses from sales. And that's just generation 1 of Surface RT.
MS would much rather keep plugging away at it and and the end of the long road have success with a cheap ARM SoC backend that costs $10 then an Intel chip that Intel would like to sell for $200.
That's beside the point. Would you rather spend money on a product that doesn't sell or money on a product that does sell?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
is still holding on, but their answer
You can say that, but their long term answer is better. They are better than Intel at integer , and once they can shift to using the integrated "graphics" component for floating point, their floating point performance should improve drastically. Intel would also improve by then so I am not saying they will definitely beat Intel.
On the other hand, Intel's approach is "winning" but it is more risky. They have bet everything on process advantage, which is enormous now and in near future. But you never know when they hit a brick wall. They might have an ace up their sleeve, but it is not visible from here.
Meanwhile, if you question their ability to survive till then - notice they bagged multiple big game console deals. This should help in directly earning revenue, and also they might get slight advantage in gaming PCs as much of PC games are console ports these days. Their high-end graphics cards can be said to be beating Nvidia's, but it is subjective.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I apologize to the Slashdot community in advance.
KATE: Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
DADE: Yeah. RISC is good.
The main reason why I need a docking station still is to handle multiple monitors. (Three, currently.)
What Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology did right after I graduated in 2003 was put everyone on what amounted to open Wi-Fi and let everyone VPN into the intranet. Is that as secure as IPsec?
Yeah you can add a keyboard, but doesn't that just make it a laptop?
Then you appear to have misunderstood the Surface ad campaign. The first ad featured the hardware and how quickly it can transform between tablet and laptop shapes. A lot of people didn't understand it because it was a setup for the second ad, which explained why it transforms. The tagline of this ad was "Surface: The tablet that runs Office." Connect the Type Cover and you can word-process. Disconnect it and you can do all the consumey things you expect from a tablet.
How Office-compatible are the allegedly Office-compatible apps? Do the Word clone and Excel clone have bug-for-bug compatible layout and macro engines? Is there an Access clone?
Android has a real problem with fragmentation
To a greater extent than PCs, whose specs and preloaded software likewise differs between manufacturers?
I have been seeing more and more developers start to move towards the Surface App Development side, like me
This might have two causes. First, well-written Windows Store apps run not only on Surface but also on traditional Windows 8 PCs in the environment formerly known as Metro. Second, developers who jump on Windows Store earlier find themselves to be larger fish in a smaller pond. But let me know when Windows on tablets has something like AIDE on Android for developing tablet applications on a tablet.
There's still demand for a device that quickly switches between tablet and not-a-tablet.
Because tablets have become cheaper than unlocked phones. Phones tend to be priced for carrier subsidy through a 24-month contract. A phone would require another smartphone line for hundreds of USD per year. A tablet runs off the Wi-Fi that most businesses and homes already pay for. That's why I still carry a $7/mo dumbphone and an Archos 43 Internet Tablet.
Intel has no interest in selling its low power Haswell chips that still barely break 10watts for $10 per chip
There is no comparison between Haswell and any ARM based chips. Order of magnitude difference in performance. So forget Haswell.
See Intel's Atom, which gets state of the art fab tech starting Bay Trail.
1. $10.
2. Ivy bridge level graphics, so more than good enough.
3. Open source graphics drivers so Android manufacturers can adopt it without having to worry about drivers - so Intel invests in fabs for it without worrying about success of Win RT.
4. Already 22nm , next year successor should be built on 14nm. Blows away the ~30/40nm ARM chips.
5. Performs at par with ARM chips.
6. And backward compatible with software written for x86 in last 20 years.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Nvidia's Logan (Tegra5) is 2.25 Watt and can run many shaders Project Logan - FaceWorks "Ira" demo
I think given the performance of ARM systems already that it would be a mistake to ignore that given the huge power savings and lower cost of ARM.