Microsoft → Re: [poll] What will happen with Win8?

Thanks, I enjoy our talks too

I do respect your point of view,...

I'm actually on something of a vacation right now but am getting snowed out (yesterday) and rained out (today) but I'm cool with it.

Anyway, I think Intel can and will bring the fight to ARM devices in due time. It does sort of make some sense for AMD to make ARM chips and X86 / X64 chips as well though. There are even rumors that Intel foundries are in talks for ARM manufacturing too,...

As oddball as it might be I'm interested in buying the ASUS Fonepad which is Android on Intel Atom:

ASUS FonePad official: 7-inch tablet with phone functionality, priced at $249 (hands-on) Hands-on

It seems reasonably cheap and functional. It could serve as a nice GPS for the car (I think) and an in car phone (if I forget my phone).

I don't think the history is written just yet, Intel has a chance to pull this out of the fire.

Microsoft has money to throw at their problems but with Zune they proved that they were also willing to cut their losses and run. So who knows how hard they are willing to push Windows RT. Still, Windows RT seems like or feels like (IMO) the answer to a question a lot of people never asked.

One thing is for sure though. Intel and Microsoft's WinTel alliance was in lockstep for quite some time (AMD as well). Something happened to fracture that covenant

I don't think "in due time" is quite right - the fight has already been brought. Intel has already shown it can do high performance at same or better power consumption than ARM in Medfield and even Clovertrail Tablets. I think over time that gap will widen with Intel's manufacturing lead. (full disclosure, I work for Intel - but of course, standard disclaimers apply, I do not speak for them in any way.)

To be clear, my point by saying "in due time", was simply to say that Intel Atom doesn't have the same market penetration as ARM on smartphones and tablets. Also note there are even some hybrid desktops with ARM processors as well as ARM based servers entering the market threatening what used to quasi x86 / x64 only territory.

Let's be clear, having a superior product doesn't assure anything especially so if one is trailing in mindshare,...

Victory is not assured,....

Well without knowing the full technical specs, I'd say x86/64 bit being a jack of all trades generally being a little slower than the more linear processors like gpus as they have a far bigger instruction set. I'd almost say if they could drop some legacy from the x86 instructions which would unfortunately cause problems for some software, and operating systems would allow them to be faster on the same or less power. It would just mean that this new hardware would need a new os, and newer software, however even adoption of 64-bit software on Win 64-bit has been slow with many still only releasing 32-bit software. All tablets currently to my knowledge with the exception of the surface pro are 32-bit.

Adding to the instruction set seems to be the way of the industry rather then detracting from it. Some special cases might call for it though, I wouldn't really know,...

My aging ASUS Eee slate EP121 Core i5 tablet PC pre-dates Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge but is still reasonably powerful. It shipped with the 64bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium and now runs Windows 8 Pro 64bit. Microsoft Surface Pro isn't really anything new. It seems to be getting undue attention due to being Microsoft branded and it seems some people didn't even know PC tablets existed until Microsoft brought attention to it with the Surface Pro.

One thing I find interesting though is Ubuntu for Smartphones and tablets. My main interest here is that apperently it can be installed on a range of ARM devices. until now, i havent really come across an OS that was intended to be installed on devices that originally shipped with dissimilar OSes.

Why should anyone care about this? Well that is the type of flexibility that helped Microsoft gain such a large market share. If a company comes along with a slick OS that can be installed over iOS, Android and Windows RT devices it could erode the market for these companies,....especially if its an easy to use relatively open platform.

Even if such an OS doesn't take over ARM devices it could force the popular ARM OSes into being a little more flexible and open. It could also force them to support their hardware longer or risk it running a competing OS,....

I had heard the ms tablets were secure boot locked down to where it can't be disabled, but I cannot confirm that first hand so your older tablet might have a real advantage.

I came across people who put nix on their smartphones years ago when I worked for a cellular company, but didn't really pay attention to them. I'm sure they were already running some form of proprietary os, or nix already anyway.

Honestly after using ubuntu it's definitely useable, and an alternative, however when I was previously running ubuntu it was all over the place with it's support. While this won't apply to a tablet, the mouse movement was a slug at best, literally dragging it across my desk compared to windows, and I had to make a manual script to run a command line option to change the sensitivity of the mouse considerably from the debian documentation as the gui settings didn't go any higher. This among other issues. It will work for some, but definitely not everyone.

When it comes to the hardware, I'm sure once they bought them other than pushing out updates they don't really care what the consumers do with them, but with it being locked down will make it harder to mess with them. A person could even brick it doing it wrong, that is if an os update doesn't brick it first, and with secure boot always on the recovery options seem quite limited unless it can be flashed like most popular smartphones.

Please don't form an opinion of Linux based on Ubuntu. New releases are pushed out of the door way too soon and would benefit greatly with far more testing and debugging.