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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.
a working product is still nearly zero. Too many teams have competing priorities plus our reviews compare us against competing teams so we try to drag everyone down to the same level. It sucks that after over twenty years at Microsoft, nothing I've ever worked on has ever made it into a customer's hands because of stupid infighting.
I'm posting this on my Thinkpad T420 with the 2520m Sandybridge i5 chip. A Snapdragon 835 benchmarks at almost exactly half the speed of this 6 year old laptop. So a chip that at best is half as fast as a low end device of more than half a decade old is now going to be loaded down even more doing "binary translation" of x86 calls into ARM. And I'm supposed to be excited?
FWIW, I dipped my toes into the Atom powered 2-in-1 market with the Acer 10 thing. It checks most of the boxes from this announcement regarding battery life, portability, etc. yet it collects dust. Why? Because it is slow. I don't care how pocketable a full Windows device is, if trying to do any real work on it is a frustrating experience of waiting that makes me want to chunk it out the nearest window, I think I'll pass.
Based on the fact that Intel couldn't even be bothered to stay in the market for this stuff leads me to believe that most other consumers agree with me.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.