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Intel Pushes Into Tablet Market, Pushes Away From Microsoft
jfruh (300774) writes "The Wintel cartel appears to be well and truly dead, as Intel chases after ARM with grim determination into the rapidly growing world of Android tablets. 'Our mix of OSes reflects pretty much what you see in the marketplace,' the company's CEO said, a nice way of saying they see more potential growth from white-box Chinese tablet makers than from Microsoft Surface. Intel managed to ship 5 million tablet chips in the first quarter of the year, although plunging PC sales meant that company profit overall was still down."
I thought Windows 8.1 was the defecto standard.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
ARM is the defecto standard upon all software that is mobile.
How so? Android apps are written in Java that compiles to Dalvik VM. Free apps that use NDK, such as those on F-Droid, can be recompiled by anyone. Proprietary apps that use NDK can be recompiled by their publisher if the publisher wants sales on the other platform. How big is the remaining set of apps that 1. use NDK, 2. are proprietary, 3. whose publisher is unwilling to take the money from Android/x86 users?
Intel are reducing power consumption and maintaining performance faster than ARM can improve processing power while keeping power consumption down. The current version of the iPad has a lot more processing power than the first one did but it has a battery three times bigger to give it the same endurance between charges, in large part because the newer ARM chips suck more power than their predecessors did.
Intel-based tablets like the Iconia W series (i3/i5) or Toshiba Encore (Atom quad-core) have the same endurance as ARM-based tablets with similar battery capacities while running a full-fat desktop OS rather than a phone OS with delusions of competency.
"The Wintel cartel appears to be well and truly dead
We're in the process of revamping my company's IT infrastructure: About 30 Wintel PC's, 3 Wintel Servers, and 0 *pads.
Unfortunately for my company's employees, we don't make money from watching Netflix or playing whatever this week's hot game is on tablets. We have to do work to earn money, and we can't do work on tablets or phones.
I don't respond to AC's.
I would not dismiss Windows on the tablet. The new Phone OS is going to support universal apps so one app can run on the phone, tablet, and PCs which will help. I personally like Android but Windows big advantages are great development tools and a lot of developers. Now if Microsoft would just allow side loading on tablets and PCs like you do on PCs and PC based tablets.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yep, I have a surface pro 2. I love it for zbrush. It's a one of a kind device for that kind of work. Literally nothing else exists. For the price of a cintiq you get the computer too. I wish they advertised it heavily to artists, instead of ipad users. An ipad user is going to be like "this thing weighs like 5 pounds and is a half an inch thick, I want my dollar/mass ratio to be close to infinity!". An artist will be like "You mean I can do my zbrush sculpting at a coffee shop with the same workflow that I use on a cintiq, AND it can handle 15m tris like a champion? Yes please."
No, at the time Intel was trying to trim down as they had overextended themselves and too many unprofitable departments. I worked in that department shortly before it was sold off; right before that, the department head "resigned" on the heels of very poor performance. Around that time, they also got rid of their consumer products division which made wireless keyboards and mice and a crappy digital camera. Not long after, they went through a big downsizing called "SET" where they just got rid of people all over the company. They went from around 100k employes down to around 80k in just a couple of years.
No, the PC is the refrigerator. Tablets are the beds. A home needs exactly one refrigerator (more are a luxury), but it needs about one bed per person. Now consider that people have been sleeping in refrigerators for the past 20 years. Thus, the market for refrigerators is highly over-saturated, and the market for beds is seeing explosive growth as millions of people have never had one before. In the end, though, everybody still needs a refrigerator. There may come a day when they don't, but everybody knows that a refrigerator isn't a bed.
Yes, the metaphor is a bit strained.
Point being that consumers are realizing that tablets do about 90% of what they want in a PC, so they just buy tablets. That doesn't mean they don't occasionally need something for that remaining 10%. We may see tablet docks that turn a tablet PC into a full desktop setup, but we're not there yet. I can browse the web, watch a movie, play a song, look up information, and type an email or text on a tablet or phone. I can probably do my online banking -- although it's a bit cumbersome. I wouldn't want to write a paper, or seriously manage my finances, or do photo editing, or do my taxes on a tablet (unless I was single, had no kids, had one job which withheld taxes, and did not own a home).
Besides, all Intel has to do is make a better ARM than ARM. They did that before when AMD introduced AMD64, and now that Intel fabs ARM, they can learn the ins and outs of that, since obviously there's something there that they missed. Intel still has the most advanced fabrication plants in the world. It would be foolish to write them off so quickly.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
It's done in software with hardware assist - Intel calls this technology "Houdini". Most Android apps are Dalvik which Intel has an X86-optimized implementation of. The translated apps run quite well for most purposes, but yes, there is a performance penalty. I did run some games but probably not the really compute-intensive ones. I found the performance overall quite good - at least as good as my iPad 3 - and to most users the choice of processor would be transparent. For apps which are ARM binary, a growing number are also providing X86 binaries.