At lower volume, ARM SOCs run $10-$15 typical, and you can bet Apple wasn't paying that, 'cept maybe for the big fat A5x. CPUs were far more of a high profit item for Intel, since they controlled them, but ARM has made the CPU market nearly competitive as memory -- another big market for Samsung.
I think Samsung's losing Apple's business any way they slice it... Apple doesn't need to have their chip foundry run by their strongest competitor, particularly given the high quality of commercial chip fabs that don't do any of their own chip production (Global Foundries, TSMC, etc).
Samsung can't just raise the price by 20% on an ongoing contract. This was probably a renewal of an existing contract.
Sure... and Apple can't all of a sudden start charging $500+ per copy of MacOS to kill off Mac Cloning. Yet they did.
It's all based on what's in the contract. There's undoubtedly something in there about increased expenses. A billion in legal expenses sure qualifies, unless specifically excluded in the contract.
Supposedly, Apple tried to buy TSMC's entire output of 28nm chips... and was denied. Which makes perfect sense -- they have a better position supporting all sorts of companies, particularly given how big the fabless companies (Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, nVidia, etc) are getting. It's certain Apple wants to find alternate fabs, now that they're no longer dependent on Samsung to design the A-series SOCs for them. But they may be too large to jump entirely to a single alternate, even in 2014.
Samsung, on the other hand, is already the world's largest semiconductor company in volume if not market cap (that's Intel, of course, with Samsung at #2), and given the rise of the ARM, they'll have plenty of other folks to build chips for in the future. Assuming they don't scare them all away -- the PC industry might have evolved differently if Intel had jumped into retail PCs in the early days.
My titles have usually been "Engineer" (for the record, I have a double degree, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics), but the current employer uses "Developer". That might actually reflect the fact that plenty of folks who don' t have formal Engineering degrees (some may have attended a 2-year college, others may have simply learned it all "on the street"), so this is a bit more inclusive. First guy I worked for, out of college, had only the "on-the-street" learning, and yet, he's one of the finest Engineers I know, in every sense of the title.
Of course, in some files, like electrical power engineering (and probably other jobs where stuff blows up if you do it wrong), you can't say you're an Engineer without taking a Professional Engineer's certification -- like passing the Bar as a lawyer, etc.
Apple has had some good ideas, or at least ideas that seem reasonable. Sure, a touchscreen on a desktop is stupid -- vertical touch screens, light pens, anything that puts that much repetitive large motor stress on your arms was soundly rejected in the 1970s. Apple seems to have people left who remember this. Plus, on a desktop, you have all kinds of space for interface devices. I'll keep my mouse, my keyboard, my graphics tablet, my SpaceExplorer, and my Jog Shuttle (ok, these are actually spread across two different PC systems)... but Apple's multitouch trackpad isn't a horrible idea (though maybe a touch top mouse would work better). Gesture UIs have been around since the 1980s or earlier (I used this on Apollo/Mentor CAD systems in the 80s), but didn't catch on until the mobile world gave us an actual reason to think smearing greasy fingers over our viewscreen was a good idea. That does make sense for mobile, even perhaps on laptops, but not on the desktop. Doesn't mean a desktop UI can't benefit from real improvements in PC control, but moving a whole tablet OS onto the desktop unchanged is a serious failure. Moving a whole content-consumption UI onto a content-creation computer is an even more egregious failure.
While true... that's Apple going from 4.8% of all the world's PCs to 5.2% in one year. And that's numerically -- Apple's pretty much killing off their high end and courting the folks who roll in on iOS's coattails. MacOS is only 15% of Apple's revenue, and falling... it can't remain that important to them and simultaneously take more resources than iOS. Something's got to give.
Yup.. Laurie Larson-Green was apparently very instrumental in the ribbon making it to Office... though Sinofsky put it in on the Windows 8 Explorer. Similarly, Larson-Green was heavily involved in bringing the Zune interface to Windows Phone... but Sinofsky put it in Windows 8. There was, apparently, friction from Sinofsky against any group that he didn't control, including Windows Phone.
The other thing... the Microsofties seem to regard Sinofsky as brilliant but abrasive. They seem to regard Larson-Green as an idiot and a follower. But I guess Ballmer won't have to argue for things anymore.
Pretty much every other Windows release has been PRIMARILY about Microsoft's internal corporate goals. Certainly Vista and WinME were. There's kind of a pattern in this... those are the versions that SUCK. When you collaborate with users, hire actual GUI designers (hopefully a few well versed in cognitive psychology), actually study the work habits of the folks working on your platform (not just the play habits of those playing on the devices of your perceived competitor), you get a better result. When it's dictated by one guy, regardless of whether it works or not, it's probably going to suck.
The problem is, when they nix the Windows 7 desktop, they take all power user with it.
Not a problem when they're chasing the iOS crowd... Windows 8/Zune/Metro interface is as reasonable a non-interface/program launcher as that of iOS, when you're consuming information. I don't really need a web browser popping up in front of my movie, if I'm watching a video on a tablet of phone (which happens... occasionally). And certainly, the tiny screens limit the value of these things too, no matter how many pixels they pack in (my current Android tablet does 1920x1200, same as each of my desktop monitors).
However, for any kind of creative work, I need windows, windows, windows. I need lots of information sources in the same visual context as my work environment. And this is the same, whether it's coding, circuit design, drawing a PCB, editing a video, mixing a recording, writing (songs, articles), editing photographs, or any of the other creative things I actually do on my PC (ok, that most of 'em). Creation is a collaborative process, even if it's just one person doing that creating. You don't get that on a full-screen only UI.
Well, Julie Larson-Green is that woman, and yeah, she lead the move to put the Zune, er, Metro, er, Something-that-isn't-Zune-or-Metro interface on Windows Phone 7. However, Sinofsky was THE guy responsible for it moving to Windows proper, the guy pushing "same UI everywhere". One wonders if he's actually used a computer in a professional environment before... but I digress. The worst about this, if you're a Microsoft fan.. the Microsofties respect Sinofsky, even if they often hated his guts. They just seem to think Larson-Green is an idiot.
Surface sales are "modest" according to Ballmer. Given that, a month out from Vista's release, Vista was dubbed the best selling OS of all time, I'm guessing that's marketing speak for "suuuuuuccckkkkksssss". But even that's more information than what's come out about Windows 8 sales.
There's a story that Sinosky wanted to be the overlord of all things Microsoft. I'm guessing, if Windows 8 and RT were flying off the shelves, setting new records, loved by the people, etc. that conversation with Ballmer would probably have gone differently than "hero to zero" in a week.
That $16 billion is Microsoft's revenue, not their profits. Net income was $4.47 billion... still, not too shabby. Apple logged revenue of $46.33 billion and net profit of $13.06 billion. Google reported revenue of $10.65 billion, but only $2.91 billion profit. Red Hat? They did $314.7 million in revenue, $37.5 million in net profit.
This tells the story of why Microsoft keeps trying to reinvent themselves as Apple. If only they didn't do it so badly. But then again, Apple's showing signs of not doing it so well these days, too.
The Raspberry Pi uses a Broadcom BCM2835 SOC, which contains an ARM11 series core -- a step below the old ARM Cortex A8, the CPU core in the early iPhone and Android devices.
The hardware cost won't be the only factor, though. Intel compatibility (thus, real Windows) and of course, the ability to save money not having to include Office, will both likely factor into the race to the bottom between RT and cheap Intel tablets. Microsoft clearly didn't want that to be on their watch -- their Surface Pro is using an i5 Ivy Bridge CPU. That's another can of worms entirely -- do they get battery life worthy of tablet? And how heavy/thick is it? And wouldn't you be better off with a $500 laptop than a $1000+ tablet, given identical performance?
The Tegra 3 does HD video playback at like 2W... that's a bad example, since the power used is based largely on what you're using for video acceleration hardware, not anything much to do with CPU or GPU resources.
The SGX545 GPU is certainly respectable for a portable device. However, the Atom cores in these are only slightly faster than an ARM Cortex A9 at the same clock speed (5% faster on SPECint, based on AnandTech's article). They seemed much faster when running at 1.8-2.0GHz compared to Apple devices clocking in at 1GHz, but most of the other tablets are running at or near the same clock speed -- and with twice the cores. Not to mention the new developments like the Apple A6x or the Samsung Exynos 5250 (Nexus 10), which is wiping the floor with Intel's new Atom.
Not the whole story, of course. The Z2760 does actually have dual 64-bit, DDR3 capable buses, versus the single 32-bit DDR3 bus on the Tegra 3, or dual 32-bit DDR2 buses on many of the other SOCs. However, the newer ARMs are increasing memory bus speed and width, too.
Of course, they're Intel, so they may fix this in a year. The choice of CPU doesn't matter much on Android. But certainly for Windows, Intel offers a huge advantage, even if they're on par, or even a bit slower than the Android tablets. They can probably even sell for less, given that Office doesn't come unbundled from RT, but does from regular Windows 8. And of course, all that application compatibility. I expect Intel to fully advertise this fact, and put "Runs Real Windows" or some-such on Atom tablets being sold right alongside ARM.
That's the other thing -- what's really compatible with what?
Ok, nothing but Windows 8 is allowed to run Win32 apps. Unless they're from Microsoft. On a tablet. What about a phone -- do I get Office RT on a smartphone? I have the same office apps on my Android tablet and phone, identical apps, so I'd want that too, were I to move to Windows devices (not likely, but just sayin'). We have been told that Windows 7 Phone apps will run on Windows 8 Phone, Windows RT, and Windows 8. But how about actual WinRT apps... do these just work everywhere? Or at least the same app on phone and tablet? Or is this fragmented like iOS, with phone apps that run on the tablet, but tablet apps that don't work on the phone. Or do Windows Phone 8 apps run anywhere else, or just on the phone?
I simply have not seen any answer to this, and it seems already to be unnecessarily fragmented. Particularly considering that in the other stores (iTunes, Google Play, Amazon), the apps follow the user to any device, they're not locked to one or two devices like most desktop apps are.
Windows 8 will likely, at some point, end up on 300-500 million PCs, like Windows 7.
Or 30-50 million, like Windows Vista. It all depends on how they sell the Metro interface to desktop users. That's the most obvious way to drive any adoption of the RT tablet. The full Windows tablets, on the other hand, are useful to anyone already using Windows on a PC or laptop, other than performance concerns.
It actually does matter, to Microsoft, if it's selling RT tablets, because these are what drive the adoption of WinRT/Metro applications. If everyone's buying regular PCs and x86 tablets, still all running Win32/64 applications, this is good for the traditional PC of course, but it kills Microsoft's goals in mobile. They need WinRT succeeding, to drive the phone, if not necessarily the tablet.
Did they change the video connector on the Surface RT? The original specs called for a proprietary video connector, which could break out via adapter to either HDMI or VGA. It's still on the web site as being proprietary... here's the footnote: "Requires Surface HD Digital AV Adapter, sold separately".
And no, you can't join a Windows Domain with an RT device. The Wacom/Samsung Note style pen interface is only on Surface Pro, not on the Surface itself -- for using classic/real Windows apps. My current and last companies moved off of Office long ago -- really only of interest in Windows-only companies.
Much of the rest of this has been working in Android for years now.
There are over 100,000 USB2 (or lower) peripherals.
And the number that Windows RT has drivers for?
Not to accidentally promote Windows RT or anything, but supposedly, Windows RT ships with the same collection of drivers for USB devices that ships with full Windows 8. It is very true that, back in the days of Windows NT on Alpha and PowerPC, it was really just a recompile, even for a driver, to get it working on the other CPU architectures, assuming the Windows HAL was correctly used. So this does seem credible. No idea how you'd go about adding drivers, though -- they would certainly not be allowed in the Windows Store -- drivers need to do things considered illegal for a WinRT program. Same reason the only binary compiler you're going to see is Visual C++ -- the VC++ runtime has a special exemption in the Windows Store, but nothing else using the same basic functions (allocations, exception unwinding, etc) gets through. Other compilers could, though, target the.NET common virtual machine platform, they say.
With that said, pretty much everything mentioned here already works with USB and Android. Which makes some sense -- Linux typically has better support these days across the board for hardware than Windows, since new versions of Windows drop legacy hardware, new versions of Linux pretty much don't. My tablet will connect to external HDDs (Win32, NTFS, as well as Linux formats) just dandy. Have not tried a great deal of devices. And of course, Android will have the same security issues with new drivers that Windows RT or iOS would -- just that it's pretty easy to root the tablet and install any driver you like, in the usual Linux way, if you do need to do that.
Also, Ballmer recently called Microsoft a "Devices and Services" company, despite the fact that, at the time, they made exactly one "device" (the X-Box 360), and sure, sell some services, but primarily, software. If this is really a change in their thinking, they might be branching out to other platforms with some kind of software as a service version of Office.
Then again, Office itself is highly overrated. Android will have Open Office ported soon, it's already got a few perfectly good office suites. My current and previous company dumped any Office requirements long ago -- you can write in any format you like, just be sure to publish to PDF and, when you're done, put an editable copy up in Google Docs. I have several office suites on my Transformer tablet, as well as Google Drive itself, that can grab from Google Docs, let you edit offline, then sync back up. MS-Office is simply not that necessary... and I suspect this is pretty common, at least among engineering organizations. Never got that Linux version of Office, so Office became the unnecessary thing.
Microsoft and Sony spend billions on R&D just so that they can "win" ; because if they "lose" that means they won't be around. Instead of working together, and lowering their expenses they have their ego, pride, and greed so far up their ass that they would rather waste people's lives redeveloping the _same_ thing just so that the other guy is forced to "play the game."
Thing is, when companies like this spend all this money to "win", the consumer really does benefit. Competition isn't useful in many areas, but it's been great for progress in the electronics industry. Without the competition, there's not the same motivation to deliver a better experience than the next guy. That's going to mean a lesser product... until some other company looks at that, decides they can do better, and starts to compete again. This is why we have "phones" in our pockets more powerful than the PCs on our desktop 10 years ago. Sure, a company has to outdo itself a little to sell upgrades... but the frantic pace of technology growth, particularly in the consumer sector, is driven by competition. Which is why it happened in the USA, in Japan, in South Korea -- not the USSR or North Korea.
BB10 and Windows 8 have advantages over both and may or may not be a better fit than the two current leaders. Well, it's easy to see the Windows 8 advantage over BB10 -- it actually exists.
Windows RT is going to be a strange puppy... it says "Windows", but doesn't run anything users identify as Windows programs. I do wonder how Microsoft plans to deal with that customer confusion, particularly given that full Windows 8 tablets are likely to show up in stores, same form factor, same price, and offer full Windows compatibility. This isn't going to be the Surface Pro, which is based on the same i5 CPU found in $500-$650 laptops, and will likely sell for over twice that of an RT tablet. But tablets built on the Z2760 will match the price, power, and performance of a two-core ARM at the same clock speed -- not quite a performance match for the Surface RT, but close, since the Surface is only running 1.2GHz or so on a T30 or possibly even T30L, not a T33. These should any useful WinRT apps that show up just dandy, but also real Windows programs (well, 32-bit only, modest RAM amounts, Atom core, maybe not so well, but "not so well" beats the hell out of "not at all" for most users). You might even see Window 8 Z2760 tablets selling for less than RT tablets, since it's not required for x86 tablet makers to bundle Office, but they have to on Windows RT.
Microsoft has repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly claimed the Windows RT is NOT for businesses. They don't support Domains on it (easily could), they ship with a not-for-business version of Home and School Office, etc. It's not a given that all this business software is magically going to show up on WinRT -- particularly since, on the full Windows 8 Pro devices (tablets, regular PCs), this stuff already exists.
The X-Box 360 connection is definitely one they should pursue -- that's pretty much the Microsoft product with the most user love out there. Gamers really do like the 360, particularly now they've fixed most of the bugs. I was kind of shocked that they didn't try to tie Windows 7 Phone into X-Box gaming, but rather, set such horrible specs (slower GPUs than the iPhone 3GS) that real gaming wasn't an option. With the newer consumer stuff, phones and RT tablets, they'll certainly be on par with many iPads and Android devices out there. iOS has already become the leading mobile gaming platform, pretty much blowing away Sony and Nintendo, but that kind of established that beachhead for Microsoft, if they go that way. Google hasn't done anything special to promote Android as a gaming platform, aside from supporting pretty much any ARM SOC you like, and yet, it's already pretty well supported there.
Slashdot Mirror
At lower volume, ARM SOCs run $10-$15 typical, and you can bet Apple wasn't paying that, 'cept maybe for the big fat A5x. CPUs were far more of a high profit item for Intel, since they controlled them, but ARM has made the CPU market nearly competitive as memory -- another big market for Samsung.
I think Samsung's losing Apple's business any way they slice it... Apple doesn't need to have their chip foundry run by their strongest competitor, particularly given the high quality of commercial chip fabs that don't do any of their own chip production (Global Foundries, TSMC, etc).
In particular, Apple doesn't seem to have done much with floating point. ARM sure did... check out the expanded Geekbench results:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/nexus-10-tablet-is-a-solid-house-built-on-shifting-sands/3/
Apple's still ahead on GPU performance. As a big games company, no surprise on that one -- that's what people do with iOS.
Samsung can't just raise the price by 20% on an ongoing contract. This was probably a renewal of an existing contract.
Sure... and Apple can't all of a sudden start charging $500+ per copy of MacOS to kill off Mac Cloning. Yet they did.
It's all based on what's in the contract. There's undoubtedly something in there about increased expenses. A billion in legal expenses sure qualifies, unless specifically excluded in the contract.
Supposedly, Apple tried to buy TSMC's entire output of 28nm chips... and was denied. Which makes perfect sense -- they have a better position supporting all sorts of companies, particularly given how big the fabless companies (Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, nVidia, etc) are getting. It's certain Apple wants to find alternate fabs, now that they're no longer dependent on Samsung to design the A-series SOCs for them. But they may be too large to jump entirely to a single alternate, even in 2014.
Samsung, on the other hand, is already the world's largest semiconductor company in volume if not market cap (that's Intel, of course, with Samsung at #2), and given the rise of the ARM, they'll have plenty of other folks to build chips for in the future. Assuming they don't scare them all away -- the PC industry might have evolved differently if Intel had jumped into retail PCs in the early days.
My titles have usually been "Engineer" (for the record, I have a double degree, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics), but the current employer uses "Developer". That might actually reflect the fact that plenty of folks who don' t have formal Engineering degrees (some may have attended a 2-year college, others may have simply learned it all "on the street"), so this is a bit more inclusive. First guy I worked for, out of college, had only the "on-the-street" learning, and yet, he's one of the finest Engineers I know, in every sense of the title.
Of course, in some files, like electrical power engineering (and probably other jobs where stuff blows up if you do it wrong), you can't say you're an Engineer without taking a Professional Engineer's certification -- like passing the Bar as a lawyer, etc.
Apple has had some good ideas, or at least ideas that seem reasonable. Sure, a touchscreen on a desktop is stupid -- vertical touch screens, light pens, anything that puts that much repetitive large motor stress on your arms was soundly rejected in the 1970s. Apple seems to have people left who remember this. Plus, on a desktop, you have all kinds of space for interface devices. I'll keep my mouse, my keyboard, my graphics tablet, my SpaceExplorer, and my Jog Shuttle (ok, these are actually spread across two different PC systems)... but Apple's multitouch trackpad isn't a horrible idea (though maybe a touch top mouse would work better). Gesture UIs have been around since the 1980s or earlier (I used this on Apollo/Mentor CAD systems in the 80s), but didn't catch on until the mobile world gave us an actual reason to think smearing greasy fingers over our viewscreen was a good idea. That does make sense for mobile, even perhaps on laptops, but not on the desktop. Doesn't mean a desktop UI can't benefit from real improvements in PC control, but moving a whole tablet OS onto the desktop unchanged is a serious failure. Moving a whole content-consumption UI onto a content-creation computer is an even more egregious failure.
While true... that's Apple going from 4.8% of all the world's PCs to 5.2% in one year. And that's numerically -- Apple's pretty much killing off their high end and courting the folks who roll in on iOS's coattails. MacOS is only 15% of Apple's revenue, and falling... it can't remain that important to them and simultaneously take more resources than iOS. Something's got to give.
Yup.. Laurie Larson-Green was apparently very instrumental in the ribbon making it to Office... though Sinofsky put it in on the Windows 8 Explorer. Similarly, Larson-Green was heavily involved in bringing the Zune interface to Windows Phone... but Sinofsky put it in Windows 8. There was, apparently, friction from Sinofsky against any group that he didn't control, including Windows Phone.
The other thing... the Microsofties seem to regard Sinofsky as brilliant but abrasive. They seem to regard Larson-Green as an idiot and a follower. But I guess Ballmer won't have to argue for things anymore.
Pretty much every other Windows release has been PRIMARILY about Microsoft's internal corporate goals. Certainly Vista and WinME were. There's kind of a pattern in this... those are the versions that SUCK. When you collaborate with users, hire actual GUI designers (hopefully a few well versed in cognitive psychology), actually study the work habits of the folks working on your platform (not just the play habits of those playing on the devices of your perceived competitor), you get a better result. When it's dictated by one guy, regardless of whether it works or not, it's probably going to suck.
The problem is, when they nix the Windows 7 desktop, they take all power user with it.
Not a problem when they're chasing the iOS crowd... Windows 8/Zune/Metro interface is as reasonable a non-interface/program launcher as that of iOS, when you're consuming information. I don't really need a web browser popping up in front of my movie, if I'm watching a video on a tablet of phone (which happens... occasionally). And certainly, the tiny screens limit the value of these things too, no matter how many pixels they pack in (my current Android tablet does 1920x1200, same as each of my desktop monitors).
However, for any kind of creative work, I need windows, windows, windows. I need lots of information sources in the same visual context as my work environment. And this is the same, whether it's coding, circuit design, drawing a PCB, editing a video, mixing a recording, writing (songs, articles), editing photographs, or any of the other creative things I actually do on my PC (ok, that most of 'em). Creation is a collaborative process, even if it's just one person doing that creating. You don't get that on a full-screen only UI.
Well, Julie Larson-Green is that woman, and yeah, she lead the move to put the Zune, er, Metro, er, Something-that-isn't-Zune-or-Metro interface on Windows Phone 7. However, Sinofsky was THE guy responsible for it moving to Windows proper, the guy pushing "same UI everywhere". One wonders if he's actually used a computer in a professional environment before... but I digress. The worst about this, if you're a Microsoft fan.. the Microsofties respect Sinofsky, even if they often hated his guts. They just seem to think Larson-Green is an idiot.
Surface sales are "modest" according to Ballmer. Given that, a month out from Vista's release, Vista was dubbed the best selling OS of all time, I'm guessing that's marketing speak for "suuuuuuccckkkkksssss". But even that's more information than what's come out about Windows 8 sales.
There's a story that Sinosky wanted to be the overlord of all things Microsoft. I'm guessing, if Windows 8 and RT were flying off the shelves, setting new records, loved by the people, etc. that conversation with Ballmer would probably have gone differently than "hero to zero" in a week.
That $16 billion is Microsoft's revenue, not their profits. Net income was $4.47 billion... still, not too shabby. Apple logged revenue of $46.33 billion and net profit of $13.06 billion. Google reported revenue of $10.65 billion, but only $2.91 billion profit. Red Hat? They did $314.7 million in revenue, $37.5 million in net profit.
This tells the story of why Microsoft keeps trying to reinvent themselves as Apple. If only they didn't do it so badly. But then again, Apple's showing signs of not doing it so well these days, too.
The Raspberry Pi uses a Broadcom BCM2835 SOC, which contains an ARM11 series core -- a step below the old ARM Cortex A8, the CPU core in the early iPhone and Android devices.
The hardware cost won't be the only factor, though. Intel compatibility (thus, real Windows) and of course, the ability to save money not having to include Office, will both likely factor into the race to the bottom between RT and cheap Intel tablets. Microsoft clearly didn't want that to be on their watch -- their Surface Pro is using an i5 Ivy Bridge CPU. That's another can of worms entirely -- do they get battery life worthy of tablet? And how heavy/thick is it? And wouldn't you be better off with a $500 laptop than a $1000+ tablet, given identical performance?
Most of the ARM SOCs range in the $15-$20 range for a higher end tablet chips. Sure, there are much cheaper ones... anything from China, for example.
The Tegra 3 does HD video playback at like 2W... that's a bad example, since the power used is based largely on what you're using for video acceleration hardware, not anything much to do with CPU or GPU resources.
The SGX545 GPU is certainly respectable for a portable device. However, the Atom cores in these are only slightly faster than an ARM Cortex A9 at the same clock speed (5% faster on SPECint, based on AnandTech's article). They seemed much faster when running at 1.8-2.0GHz compared to Apple devices clocking in at 1GHz, but most of the other tablets are running at or near the same clock speed -- and with twice the cores. Not to mention the new developments like the Apple A6x or the Samsung Exynos 5250 (Nexus 10), which is wiping the floor with Intel's new Atom.
Not the whole story, of course. The Z2760 does actually have dual 64-bit, DDR3 capable buses, versus the single 32-bit DDR3 bus on the Tegra 3, or dual 32-bit DDR2 buses on many of the other SOCs. However, the newer ARMs are increasing memory bus speed and width, too.
Of course, they're Intel, so they may fix this in a year. The choice of CPU doesn't matter much on Android. But certainly for Windows, Intel offers a huge advantage, even if they're on par, or even a bit slower than the Android tablets. They can probably even sell for less, given that Office doesn't come unbundled from RT, but does from regular Windows 8. And of course, all that application compatibility. I expect Intel to fully advertise this fact, and put "Runs Real Windows" or some-such on Atom tablets being sold right alongside ARM.
That's the other thing -- what's really compatible with what?
Ok, nothing but Windows 8 is allowed to run Win32 apps. Unless they're from Microsoft. On a tablet. What about a phone -- do I get Office RT on a smartphone? I have the same office apps on my Android tablet and phone, identical apps, so I'd want that too, were I to move to Windows devices (not likely, but just sayin'). We have been told that Windows 7 Phone apps will run on Windows 8 Phone, Windows RT, and Windows 8. But how about actual WinRT apps... do these just work everywhere? Or at least the same app on phone and tablet? Or is this fragmented like iOS, with phone apps that run on the tablet, but tablet apps that don't work on the phone. Or do Windows Phone 8 apps run anywhere else, or just on the phone?
I simply have not seen any answer to this, and it seems already to be unnecessarily fragmented. Particularly considering that in the other stores (iTunes, Google Play, Amazon), the apps follow the user to any device, they're not locked to one or two devices like most desktop apps are.
Windows 8 will likely, at some point, end up on 300-500 million PCs, like Windows 7.
Or 30-50 million, like Windows Vista. It all depends on how they sell the Metro interface to desktop users. That's the most obvious way to drive any adoption of the RT tablet. The full Windows tablets, on the other hand, are useful to anyone already using Windows on a PC or laptop, other than performance concerns.
It actually does matter, to Microsoft, if it's selling RT tablets, because these are what drive the adoption of WinRT/Metro applications. If everyone's buying regular PCs and x86 tablets, still all running Win32/64 applications, this is good for the traditional PC of course, but it kills Microsoft's goals in mobile. They need WinRT succeeding, to drive the phone, if not necessarily the tablet.
Did they change the video connector on the Surface RT? The original specs called for a proprietary video connector, which could break out via adapter to either HDMI or VGA. It's still on the web site as being proprietary... here's the footnote: "Requires Surface HD Digital AV Adapter, sold separately".
And no, you can't join a Windows Domain with an RT device. The Wacom/Samsung Note style pen interface is only on Surface Pro, not on the Surface itself -- for using classic/real Windows apps. My current and last companies moved off of Office long ago -- really only of interest in Windows-only companies.
Much of the rest of this has been working in Android for years now.
Not to accidentally promote Windows RT or anything, but supposedly, Windows RT ships with the same collection of drivers for USB devices that ships with full Windows 8. It is very true that, back in the days of Windows NT on Alpha and PowerPC, it was really just a recompile, even for a driver, to get it working on the other CPU architectures, assuming the Windows HAL was correctly used. So this does seem credible. No idea how you'd go about adding drivers, though -- they would certainly not be allowed in the Windows Store -- drivers need to do things considered illegal for a WinRT program. Same reason the only binary compiler you're going to see is Visual C++ -- the VC++ runtime has a special exemption in the Windows Store, but nothing else using the same basic functions (allocations, exception unwinding, etc) gets through. Other compilers could, though, target the .NET common virtual machine platform, they say.
With that said, pretty much everything mentioned here already works with USB and Android. Which makes some sense -- Linux typically has better support these days across the board for hardware than Windows, since new versions of Windows drop legacy hardware, new versions of Linux pretty much don't. My tablet will connect to external HDDs (Win32, NTFS, as well as Linux formats) just dandy. Have not tried a great deal of devices. And of course, Android will have the same security issues with new drivers that Windows RT or iOS would -- just that it's pretty easy to root the tablet and install any driver you like, in the usual Linux way, if you do need to do that.
Also, Ballmer recently called Microsoft a "Devices and Services" company, despite the fact that, at the time, they made exactly one "device" (the X-Box 360), and sure, sell some services, but primarily, software. If this is really a change in their thinking, they might be branching out to other platforms with some kind of software as a service version of Office.
Then again, Office itself is highly overrated. Android will have Open Office ported soon, it's already got a few perfectly good office suites. My current and previous company dumped any Office requirements long ago -- you can write in any format you like, just be sure to publish to PDF and, when you're done, put an editable copy up in Google Docs. I have several office suites on my Transformer tablet, as well as Google Drive itself, that can grab from Google Docs, let you edit offline, then sync back up. MS-Office is simply not that necessary... and I suspect this is pretty common, at least among engineering organizations. Never got that Linux version of Office, so Office became the unnecessary thing.
Microsoft and Sony spend billions on R&D just so that they can "win" ; because if they "lose" that means they won't be around. Instead of working together, and lowering their expenses they have their ego, pride, and greed so far up their ass that they would rather waste people's lives redeveloping the _same_ thing just so that the other guy is forced to "play the game."
Thing is, when companies like this spend all this money to "win", the consumer really does benefit. Competition isn't useful in many areas, but it's been great for progress in the electronics industry. Without the competition, there's not the same motivation to deliver a better experience than the next guy. That's going to mean a lesser product... until some other company looks at that, decides they can do better, and starts to compete again. This is why we have "phones" in our pockets more powerful than the PCs on our desktop 10 years ago. Sure, a company has to outdo itself a little to sell upgrades... but the frantic pace of technology growth, particularly in the consumer sector, is driven by competition. Which is why it happened in the USA, in Japan, in South Korea -- not the USSR or North Korea.
BB10 and Windows 8 have advantages over both and may or may not be a better fit than the two current leaders.
Well, it's easy to see the Windows 8 advantage over BB10 -- it actually exists.
Windows RT is going to be a strange puppy... it says "Windows", but doesn't run anything users identify as Windows programs. I do wonder how Microsoft plans to deal with that customer confusion, particularly given that full Windows 8 tablets are likely to show up in stores, same form factor, same price, and offer full Windows compatibility. This isn't going to be the Surface Pro, which is based on the same i5 CPU found in $500-$650 laptops, and will likely sell for over twice that of an RT tablet. But tablets built on the Z2760 will match the price, power, and performance of a two-core ARM at the same clock speed -- not quite a performance match for the Surface RT, but close, since the Surface is only running 1.2GHz or so on a T30 or possibly even T30L, not a T33. These should any useful WinRT apps that show up just dandy, but also real Windows programs (well, 32-bit only, modest RAM amounts, Atom core, maybe not so well, but "not so well" beats the hell out of "not at all" for most users). You might even see Window 8 Z2760 tablets selling for less than RT tablets, since it's not required for x86 tablet makers to bundle Office, but they have to on Windows RT.
Microsoft has repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly claimed the Windows RT is NOT for businesses. They don't support Domains on it (easily could), they ship with a not-for-business version of Home and School Office, etc. It's not a given that all this business software is magically going to show up on WinRT -- particularly since, on the full Windows 8 Pro devices (tablets, regular PCs), this stuff already exists.
The X-Box 360 connection is definitely one they should pursue -- that's pretty much the Microsoft product with the most user love out there. Gamers really do like the 360, particularly now they've fixed most of the bugs. I was kind of shocked that they didn't try to tie Windows 7 Phone into X-Box gaming, but rather, set such horrible specs (slower GPUs than the iPhone 3GS) that real gaming wasn't an option. With the newer consumer stuff, phones and RT tablets, they'll certainly be on par with many iPads and Android devices out there. iOS has already become the leading mobile gaming platform, pretty much blowing away Sony and Nintendo, but that kind of established that beachhead for Microsoft, if they go that way. Google hasn't done anything special to promote Android as a gaming platform, aside from supporting pretty much any ARM SOC you like, and yet, it's already pretty well supported there.