Rumor: AMD Temash might be used in Microsoft Surface Pro 2

[Gideon]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Su...e-Book-Surface-Smartphone-Qualcomm,19478.html

According to the source, Microsoft's sequel to the ARM-based Surface RT tablet will sport an 8.9-inch display and a Qualcomm SoC instead of Nvidia's Tegra chip. Meanwhile, the Surface Pro, which doesn't even go on sale until January, will be upgraded to an 11.6-inch display. Instead of using the Intel Core i5 CPU, it will instead feature the upcoming AMD "Temash" APU.

Personally I wouldn't put too much stock on that rumor as Surface 2 Pro will then be slower across the board than its predecessor. IMHO It would make a lot more sense in a Surface (Non-pro) 2 considering the rumored TDP ranges (3,5 - 6,5 W) and estimated performance.

Now let us see how long it takes for this thread to fill with the hype from the fanboys. It certainly did with the Apple Llano rumor

 

[Yuriman]

Battery life is pretty important in a tablet. I'd rather have a tablet with twice the battery life than one with an i5. I imagine Haswell will be a better at both if it's out in time... though it would probably drive up the cost too.

 

[Zstream]

I agree, I don't want an i5 or i7 on a tablet. I would prefer a large battery and something comparable to the ipad 3 in terms of graphics. Maybe this will help, who knows.

 

[Idontcare]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Su...e-Book-Surface-Smartphone-Qualcomm,19478.html



Personally I wouldn't put too much stock on that rumor as Surface 2 Pro will then be slower across the board than its predecessor. IMHO It would make a lot more sense in a Surface (Non-pro) 2 considering the rumored TDP ranges (3,5 - 6,5 W) and estimated performance.

Now let us see how long it takes for this thread to fill with the hype from the fanboys. It certainly did with the Apple Llano rumor

Surface tablet is following the same playbook that MS used for XBOX. Leverage COTS to start out, use Intel CPU, to get a functioning product into the market first and foremost...if it gains enough traction to justify continued investment into the development of a 2nd gen product then go custom design or custom modified design afterwards (XBOX 360).

 

[Ventanni]

Temash would be perfect in a Surface Pro unit. Although Haswell would definitely be a superior APU, Temash would be significantly cheaper for sure.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Battery life is pretty important in a tablet. I'd rather have a tablet with twice the battery life than one with an i5. I imagine Haswell will be a better at both if it's out in time... though it would probably drive up the cost too.

Battery life is important, but so is decent performance. Take it from someone who wants to smash my android tablet every time I use it because the performance is so abysmal. It seems very strange to me to take a step backwards like this, especially since Haswell will be out shortly. I guess it all depends on what kind of performance Temesh has. Plus with all the problems of AMD one has to wonder if the chip will be available on time.

I read the article on Toms, and it seems they want to introduce an even more expensive model with an i5 if I recall correctly. So maybe they are wanting to tempt people with the mid level and hope they eventually move up to the top of the line. Personally, right now, I think the surface pro may be very attractive, but if they nerf the performance without lowering the price with Temesh, I would just go to some sort of ultrabook with a ulv haswell.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I heard Dell, Apple, HP, and Lenovo will abandon Intel and AMD and exclusively use VIA only.

 

[NTMBK]

I heard Dell, Apple, HP, and Lenovo will abandon Intel and AMD and exclusively use VIA only.

Good job Tom's Hardware don't consider you a reliable source.

 

[Xpage]

I heard Dell, Apple, HP, and Lenovo will abandon Intel and AMD and exclusively use VIA only.

time to buy some stock. lol

 

[Ventanni]

Battery life is important, but so is decent performance. Take it from someone who wants to smash my android tablet every time I use it because the performance is so abysmal. It seems very strange to me to take a step backwards like this, especially since Haswell will be out shortly. I guess it all depends on what kind of performance Temesh has. Plus with all the problems of AMD one has to wonder if the chip will be available on time.

AMD's product availability is, of course, of legitimate concern, but what tablet are you using that's so slow? Secondly, I'd imagine any dual Jaguar core solution (ie, Temash) is going to be significantly faster than any ARM tablet on the market. Don't even Atom cores give most ARM solutions a pretty good bruising these days, minus the ARM A15 core setups?

Haswell will undoubtedly be faster, but also more expensive.

 

[Chiropteran]

Battery life is important, but so is decent performance. Take it from someone who wants to smash my android tablet every time I use it because the performance is so abysmal. It seems very strange to me to take a step backwards like this, especially since Haswell will be out shortly.

You refuse to drive a Taurus because you once had to ride a bicycle to work and it was so much slower than your Crown Victoria.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Haswell will go into over the top type tablets . Windows 8 surface pro will have a dual core 4 threaded clover trail atom cpu followed closely by the 22nm model 4 core 4 threaded model

 

[frozentundra123456]

AMD's product availability is, of course, of legitimate concern, but what tablet are you using that's so slow? Secondly, I'd imagine any dual Jaguar core solution (ie, Temash) is going to be significantly faster than any ARM tablet on the market. Don't even Atom cores give most ARM solutions a pretty good bruising these days, minus the ARM A15 core setups?

Haswell will undoubtedly be faster, but also more expensive.

It is an Acer A100. May be just this particular unit, I dont know, but even loading internet pages, you just sit there and hope the page loads before the browser times out. Part of it may be that the wi-fi connectivity is extremely poor also, so it is hard to tell if it is the processor or lousy wi-fi. But even when it shows a strong signal you often get extremely slow page loading. I dont even try to use it for anything else but netflix, which surprisingly it plays quite well, except for again slow loading.

 

[frozentundra123456]

You refuse to drive a Taurus because you once had to ride a bicycle to work and it was so much slower than your Crown Victoria.

Huh??? Your car analogy makes no sense. A Taurus is plenty fast. Believe me if you had to compare using my tablet to driving a Taurus, the Tarus is much more competent at its intended purpose than that tablet.

Bottom line, I will never buy another tablet unless it is an iPad or runs x86 competently: I hate ARM and Android that much. I know I am unfairly judging by one isolated experience, but that is my opinion. Will Temesh do this (Edit: I mean run Windows competently), I dont know it is too soon too tell.

BTW, are you somehow offended by my previous post?? If you are, I also would be very reluctant to buy an atom tablet too, if it makes you feel better for me to criticize intel.

 

[Keysplayr]

Huh??? Your car analogy makes no sense. A Taurus is plenty fast. Believe me if you had to compare using my tablet to driving a Taurus, the Tarus is much more competent at its intended purpose than that tablet.

Bottom line, I will never buy another tablet unless it is an iPad or runs x86 competently: I hate ARM and Android that much. I know I am unfairly judging by one isolated experience, but that is my opinion. Will Temesh do this (Edit: I mean run Windows competently), I dont know it is too soon too tell.

BTW, are you somehow offended by my previous post?? If you are, I also would be very reluctant to buy an atom tablet too, if it makes you feel better for me to criticize intel.

Should try the Nexus 7. That thing is wicked.

 

[sm625]

I cant stand ARM and android either. Even the ipad is stupefying in that you cant have 4 apps running in 4 quadrants of the screen. Each quadrant of an ipad 4's screen is like a bajillion pixels, more than enough to fit an app. I just dont get why intel is throwing this market to apple. A lot of good their 60% margins are going to do em when they throw away entire markets.

 

[Chiropteran]

Huh??? Your car analogy makes no sense. A Taurus is plenty fast. Believe me if you had to compare using my tablet to driving a Taurus, the Tarus is much more competent at its intended purpose than that tablet.

Bottom line, I will never buy another tablet unless it is an iPad or runs x86 competently: I hate ARM and Android that much.

In my analogy, the Taurus was "temash", the Crown Vic the i5, and the bicycle is your slow ARM core.

Maybe I overestimated temash's capabilities, when I read "next gen APU" I was thinking it was the successor to trinity. After reading the entire article I see it's just a next gen E-450 type APU. Still, an E-450 is much faster than an ARM CPU, so I still think it's silly to immediately reject a product based on it just because an ARM CPU was too slow.

 

[inf64]

Jaguar core (inside Temash) will gave decently higher IPC than Bobcat (~15% in int and ~2x in fp,according to HC presentation) while being smaller and probably clocking the same or better. Bobcat already smacks Atom so Jaguar will naturally be much better CPU. The only unknown is how power efficient will it be(how low, power wise, they can go with GloFo's 28nm node).

 

[Ventanni]

It is an Acer A100. May be just this particular unit, I dont know, but even loading internet pages, you just sit there and hope the page loads before the browser times out. Part of it may be that the wi-fi connectivity is extremely poor also, so it is hard to tell if it is the processor or lousy wi-fi. But even when it shows a strong signal you often get extremely slow page loading. I dont even try to use it for anything else but netflix, which surprisingly it plays quite well, except for again slow loading.

It almost sounds like you have a defective unit leading back to a bad WiFi antenna, but there should be an Android 4.0 update on Acer's website. That may fix a few issues you've been experiencing.

After using an iPad 2, I can say that it's a very snappy device for web browsing. The whole thing just oozes high quality, and I'm sure the iPad 3/4 are much better.

 

[Torn Mind]

I cant stand ARM and android either. Even the ipad is stupefying in that you cant have 4 apps running in 4 quadrants of the screen. Each quadrant of an ipad 4's screen is like a bajillion pixels, more than enough to fit an app. I just dont get why intel is throwing this market to apple. A lot of good their 60% margins are going to do em when they throw away entire markets.

Well, I think it's Microsoft throwing away Intel here. After all, a core i5 mobile is pretty expensive to put in a tablet, even though this is a hybrid tablet/laptop.

 

[frozentundra123456]

In my analogy, the Taurus was "temash", the Crown Vic the i5, and the bicycle is your slow ARM core.

Maybe I overestimated temash's capabilities, when I read "next gen APU" I was thinking it was the successor to trinity. After reading the entire article I see it's just a next gen E-450 type APU. Still, an E-450 is much faster than an ARM CPU, so I still think it's silly to immediately reject a product based on it just because an ARM CPU was too slow.

I would not reject it totally, I am willing to wait for reviews I suppose. It comes down to price. If they put temesh in a tablet running Windows and sold it near the price of the Surface RT, it would be very attractive. Also if they did not limit it to Microsoft Apps.

But if they continue to price it like the current Surface pro, and considering I would want to add a keyboard, one might as well get an ultrabook with a UlV Haswell or even Trinity if they come out with some sort of similar formfactor. I think HP makes one already but I cant remember the name.

 

[frozentundra123456]

It almost sounds like you have a defective unit leading back to a bad WiFi antenna, but there should be an Android 4.0 update on Acer's website. That may fix a few issues you've been experiencing.

After using an iPad 2, I can say that it's a very snappy device for web browsing. The whole thing just oozes high quality, and I'm sure the iPad 3/4 are much better.

Actually, it did automatically upgrade to Android 4.something. Didnt really help though. Just traded one set of bugs for another. It locks up less (still does though), but it seems loading pages is actually slower. Also now it has another very serious bug in that it thinks the internal storage is full and tries to download like 5 updates every time I power it on because it cant install any of them since it thinks the local storage is full. If you analyze the storage though, it says 2.5gb is free. I cant even install a file manager app because it thinks there is not enough disk space, even though 2.5gb is supposedly open.

One of these days, I am just going to get totally fed up and hit the "restore to factory default" button.

 

[Arzachel]

Actually, it did automatically upgrade to Android 4.something. Didnt really help though. Just traded one set of bugs for another. It locks up less (still does though), but it seems loading pages is actually slower. Also now it has another very serious bug in that it thinks the internal storage is full and tries to download like 5 updates every time I power it on because it cant install any of them since it thinks the local storage is full. If you analyze the storage though, it says 2.5gb is free. I cant even install a file manager app because it thinks there is not enough disk space, even though 2.5gb is supposedly open.

One of these days, I am just going to get totally fed up and hit the "restore to factory default" button.

Is this a knitting forum? If the tablet's still on warranty, clear out your personal information and get a RMA. If it's out of warranty or you'd rather tinker with it yourself ( I don't know why anyone would want to do this, tech is scary! ), get root, flash Cyanogen and overclock the damn thing.

 

[NTMBK]

Haswell will go into over the top type tablets . Windows 8 surface pro will have a dual core 4 threaded clover trail atom cpu followed closely by the 22nm model 4 core 4 threaded model

No. The Surface Pro has an Ivy Bridge ULV dual core, not an Atom. And none of the rumours have mentioned Valleyview in the next-gen Surface Pro.