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Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs With Gigabit LTE (arstechnica.com)
Microsoft and Qualcomm have announced that Windows 10 is coming to devices made by Asus, HP and Lenovo that will run on the Snapdragon 835 platform. "The Snapdragon 835 chip, incorporating Qualcomm's latest X16 LTE modem, forms the basis of the Snapdragon Mobile PC Platform," reports Ars Technica. "Qualcomm claims that using the Snapdragon platform will offer a combination of the PC form factor and breadth of software with features that are standard in smartphones: on-the-go connectivity, light weight, silent operation, long battery life, and no fan." From the report: Qualcomm says that PCs built using the new chips will offer up to 50 percent more battery life than x86 systems, with four- to five-times longer standby times. They'll take the Connected Standby capability already found in some Windows PCs -- this allows the system to do things like sync mail and receive notifications even when "sleeping" -- and make it better, thanks to their LTE connectivity. With a Snapdragon inside your PC, you'll no longer need Wi-Fi to fetch your latest e-mail and catch up on Twitter. Instead, you'll be able to get online wherever there's cellular connectivity. The X16 modem supports up to gigabit LTE connections, too. So as long as your network operator is cooperative and has embraced the cutting edge, this mobile connection will be fast, too. Asus, HP, and Lenovo are all planning to introduce Snapdragon Mobile PC systems at some unspecified time in the future, for some unspecified price. These machines will be laptop-style systems, just without the traditional x86 processor on the inside. Snapdragon 835 has a higher level of integration than Intel's mobile chips, enabling smaller motherboards. This in turn should tend to increase the space available for battery, or reduce the size and weight of machines, or perhaps even both.
Can it run linux or *bsd?
Because the odds of MS continuing to support this in the next cycle of management change are very low.
I'll bet they drop it just like an old version of "windows phone".
Of course, if you are only planning to use it for a maximum of a couple of years go ahead - the stuff that came with it will work and you probably won't miss the new stuff coming out that will not run on it so much.
Is this including some kind of amd64 or x86 emulation? I can't imagine most Windows users will be too happy to find out they purchased a PC that's only capable of running software compiled for ARM! It would be a wonderful device to install Linux on, however, where we should have 100% compatibility. That is, of course, assuming we can reverse engineer Qualcomm's shitty proprietary drivers.
Too bad you have to blow 3GB of it on advertisements.
There are a lot of people that use laptops for extremely low powered shit. They literally do nothing but surf the web, send e-mails (often also from a browser), consume media (again from a browser), and maybe write a document or spreadsheet (yet again, maybe in a browser). You can get away with a pretty low spec system for that and still have an ok experience. So maybe they find this worth it in trade for a longer battery life. Remember the reason we get long batteries these days is not because they've increased in storage a ton, but because we do better with low power states.
Remember that the low end keeps getting better, whereas the target they are trying to reach largely stays the same. The needs for office productivity work haven't really grown in a long time, but computer power has. That makes it an easier target to reach. We even saw this with desktops: Around the Core 2 days desktops stopped sucking. What I mean is that back in the day, even when you got a brand new computer it still sucked. The fastest 486 out there was still slow as dogshit for normal work. Booting up an OS with GUI took minutes, printing out a document took 100% of the computer's power. So every upgrade was noticeable better but regular work. However around about the Core 2 that stopped being true. They were "fast enough". Newer ones were faster and that was nice, but not so much that you'd notice or care a ton.
Plus don't underestimate the worship of the Cult of Thin(tm) these days. This should be very low power compared to a normal laptop, and thus something they can potentially slim down to stupid proportions. That alone is a selling point to some people.
Not saying I'll buy one, but I understand my standards for computers are much higher than many people's.