I believe I figured out Microsoft's reasoning behind tablets

[Dominato3r]

Slightly on-topic question: I have been holding out on a Tablet because I think from a compatibility standpoint, it's best to stick to one 'ecosystem'. For instance, I have multiple terabytes of content on my desktop computer. Voluminous high-res pictures, movies, music, music videos, TV shows, HD porn etc. If I were a tablet user, I'm positive 99% of the tablet's life would be spent indoors. Hence I would want quick access to all my account, not 16/32/64GB of content that I think I would want to watch that day/week.

How easy it is with iOS/Android to stream stuff off a Windows shared folder? I'm guessing iOS would require you to have iTunes installed (and running?) for it to see your media library? I don't like that approach because it would likely require lots of transcoding since Matroska/WMV files aren't natively supported in iTunes (last time I checked).

If I were to go the Android route, would it 'just work'? What if I toss two other laptops with a ton of content in their network-shared folders (my family uses the Windows 7 HomeGroup feature quite a bit) into the loop? Would an Android tablet be able to easily see/stream all the content from the various PCs?

I figure a Windows tablet would integrate very easily into this kind of scenario. Get one with HDMI-out, connect it to the TV, no need for dedicated media streaming device.

This is basically my view. I have a feeling that a Windows 8 Tablet will integrate very nicely into the average home (Windows heavy).

 

[Slugbait]

same thing happened with Intel vs everyone else. P2 was nice. P3 was better. The Pentium Pro was a killer CPU and by the time it was renamed Xeon it was all over for Intel's high end competitors

Pentium Pro was the first P6 processor.

The Pentium II and III were successors to the Pentium Pro, and were also P6 processors.

The Pentium Pro was never "renamed" as Xeon. In fact, the first Xeon (Drake) was based on the Pentium II (Deschutes core).

 

[alent1234]

PPro was the first to have the cache on the die or the same package. P2 had the candy bar deal where the cache was on the same circuit board. forgot P3

the fact that the cache was on the die was a big deal because even then the other systems couldn't feed data fast enough to the CPU

the point is that by the time Intel came out with a real enterprise product they had enough of the low end market that kind of matured into servers that Sun and everyone else couldn't hope to compete.

same with ARM CPU's. Intel might be good for laptops and servers but the growth is in ARM devices and their power is growing very fast. and there is a huge software base. a lot of the apps in the mac app store are just repackaged iOS/android apps. if apple or acer or someone can make a laptop with an ARM CPU that does almost everything a regular laptop does including real photo editing and they can do it cheaper than paying intel/ms they will do it and leave Intel to a smaller but high end market.

there are still mainframes today but the market is A LOT smaller

 

[sm625]

Microsoft has one really big problem with tablets: They cannot power up and down their hardware without it significantly affecting the user experience. It takes 5 seconds (or more) to completely shut off an x86 tablet (hibernate). They could improve this but for some reason they just dont. It doesnt take more than a hundred mS to read out the critical (kernel) sections of the hibernation file. But no, being microsuck, they of course mindlessly read out the entire thing before even attempting to make it look like your device is awake. Why? Why not just give me my os now and make each app wait until their memory sections finish loading? Shrug. Has anyone at microsoft even asked that question? I doubt it.

And then there's the whole concept of powering down while doing just one thing, like say for example reading a web page like this one. If you are reading this entire thread and doing nothing else, then even on a windows machine, you dont need your entire OS and all its hardware to be powered up. The x86 hardware should be powered down and the browser display data should be transferred to a low power ARM device. It will be just powerful enough to scroll and select text and do basic stuff like that, but no more. If you want to do something more, like open a link, then the OS will need to wake the x86 hardware and transfer control back to that hardware. It can happen fairly quickly and most importantly it could be made transparent to the user. But microsoft doesnt do it. Why? It only costs about $20 to add a low power ARM chip to an existing x86 platform. But no one does it. No one even attempts to simply run android and windows in tandem, hibernating windows when its not needed. Microsoft could do this. They could literally devour android by doing this. (Android need not even be seen as a competitor to windows. It could be run in conjunction with windows.) But here we are in 2012, and still nothing. Yet still somehow microsoft manages to survive.

If microsoft was smart they would already be partnering with AMD to add an ARM core to the brazos die so that microsoft can allow seamless integration of android with windows 8, using a simple skin on windows 8 to hide the switching between android and windows from the end user. I just have so little faith in these two companies, I can see them totally ignoring the obvious profit potential.

 

[Slugbait]

PPro was the first to have the cache on the die or the same package.

Separate dies. But yes, same package. It resulted in low yields, so this design had a short life.

P2 had the candy bar deal where the cache was on the same circuit board.

Yes, and the cache ran at half-speed on the consumer procs. The first Xeon was designed mostly the same as the Pentium II, except the cache ran at full-speed.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Would an Android tablet be able to easily see/stream all the content from the various PCs?

Sorry it took me so long to respond to this, but I was away on vacation while my new Prime sat at home.

This morning I ran through my Prime my set of samples that I use to represent the different types of HD files I have in my MASSIVE library and I can say without a doubt that you don't need Windows to accomplish what you want to accomplish.

My Transformer Prime plus Dice Player is able to play every single sample (a big deal when the original Transformer could play none), which means it can play 98% of HD content you can get your hands on including incompetent pirates creating mkvs or straight rips off of filled Blu Rays. It is FAR more robust than many other solutions, including many Intel GPUs on the market and Broadcom decoder cards.

Combined with a SMB enabled browser (I use WiFi File Explorer) I am able to play these files over my wireless network from my two Unraid servers which share files the same way Windows does perfectly.

The future is here today, and it is called a Transformer Prime. For media playback the only thing lacking in Android so far is a decent ten-foot interface (ala XBMC) but that will come.

 

[lothar]

Regardless of what Intel is offering, their power consumption is just too high for comfort. Read about Medfield again. It consumes 2.6W when idle. Just the CPU. In contrast, compare that to 0.5W under load or 1W worst case scenario (when everything is stressed to its max) of the most power hungry ARM SoC on the market.

Would heat become an issue? Yes. With a low-power SoC, tablets like the iPad and Galaxy Tab are already emitting some heat. Quadruple that under idle and you'll see just how hot x86 can be... while it's just sitting on the desktop.

Intel actually had a viable solution with the Intel Z 500 and then Z 600 series, but for some bizarre reason, they dropped the ball, very hard, on graphics drivers support for those things. And now Z 600 can only be found on niche devices made by no-name companies, or limited production in a factory somewhere in Japan...

If you think Intel has a chance, you obviously haven't experienced the nightmare they caused with the Atom Z CPUs...

Looks like you have awoken the sleeping giant...:ninja:
What do you have to say about this?

The actual values are pretty astonishing as well. Sub 20mW idle, sub 750mW during a call on 3G and although not pictured here, Intel's internal data suggests ~1W power consumption while browsing the web compared to ~1.3W on the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S 2. I've done my own measurements on 4S web browsing and came up with a very similar value.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones

 

[theprodigalrebel]

Sorry it took me so long to respond to this, but I was away on vacation while my new Prime sat at home.

This morning I ran through my Prime my set of samples that I use to represent the different types of HD files I have in my MASSIVE library and I can say without a doubt that you don't need Windows to accomplish what you want to accomplish.

My Transformer Prime plus Dice Player is able to play every single sample (a big deal when the original Transformer could play none), which means it can play 98% of HD content you can get your hands on including incompetent pirates creating mkvs or straight rips off of filled Blu Rays. It is FAR more robust than many other solutions, including many Intel GPUs on the market and Broadcom decoder cards.

Combined with a SMB enabled browser (I use WiFi File Explorer) I am able to play these files over my wireless network from my two Unraid servers which share files the same way Windows does perfectly.

The future is here today, and it is called a Transformer Prime. For media playback the only thing lacking in Android so far is a decent ten-foot interface (ala XBMC) but that will come.

Thank you! The fact that you own a Transformer Prime makes this info even more awesome since I have heard so many good things about it. Android 4.0, Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, low price...this is great news for me.

Now I only have to wait for it to be launched locally (I'm in India) or ask someone visiting from Stateside a favor. Ah well, there's always someone in my circle visiting every 2-3 months. Maybe then!

 

[runawayprisoner]

Looks like you have awoken the sleeping giant...:ninja:
What do you have to say about this?

That's an impressive showing. Much better than what they did earlier with Medfield. Note that I didn't just pull the numbers I mentioned out of thin air:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/intel-s...rformance-power-consumption-leaked/14355.html

They have obviously come a long way.

But... couple of things to note: it's some browser benchmarks. Historically, those have never been indication of actual performance, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Software optimizations or "cheat" can result in heavily inflated scores... as demonstrated when the iPhone 4S was nearly the top dog when it came out:

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4971/apple-iphone-4s-review-att-verizon/4

A lot of things come in play there. Not to dispute Intel's numbers, of course. Those are nice numbers. I'm sure it'll come in handy on Android.

But... and this is a big but: it's the same performance that we have seen on netbooks for years, and I think my HP Slate still outperforms this thing. At least where the CPU is concerned.

Intel has handily solved the power consumption problem, and I applaud them for that. But it's not looking good because they still haven't solved the performance equation.

Also from a pure performance perspective, Medfield has a mid-end GPU at most... compared to 2011 parts. And it doesn't come until end of 2012. If, and this is a big if, 2012 tablets start coming with double the resolution last year, then that GPU would cause Intel a lot of troubles. Not to mention it's comparing against 45nm ARM parts. And from what I can see, quad-core 28nm ARM parts are coming... pretty soon. With 2.5x the clock speed.

But whatever the technicals, I think I'm starting to see a viable Windows 8 tablet design that's fanless and can have iPad-like battery now. My hat is off to Intel this round. They have earned 80% of my respect back in one fell swoop.

The other 20%? Well, they're gonna have to step up their game with EMGD at this rate. PowerVR SGX on past Atom systems are still not... up to par.

This pretty much makes Microsoft's move to ARM kind of redundant... if Intel can keep being competitive enough. They are catching up for sure.

 

[alent1234]

PowerVR 540 GPU, big big yawn

the A6, tegra 3 and all the other 2012 ARM CPU's will wipe the floor with this by the time phones ship