Displaying items by tag: ARM

Well the cat is out of the bag now and the winner is a new tablet called Surface from Microsoft. The thin (.5 inches) tablet was shown off today at the big event that Microsoft had planned for a long time. From the pictures we have seen it looks like a nice device 10.6 inches long with a gorilla glass display, full sized USB port, MIMO antenna for WiFi a track pad, 64 or 128GB of storage, and a built in kickstand. There is just one problem; Microsoft’s partners. By entering into the market like this Microsoft runs the risk of alienating their major partners for Windows based tablets.

As we reported not all that long ago the days of the 1920x1200 ARM based tablets are quickly approaching. There was a time when the market viewed the tablet as a low resolution device and indeed many had the same or lower resolution as your typical smart phone. This was odd considering the one of the biggest benefits to a tablet it more screen real estate. However even after the launch of the iPad we saw signs that touch panel technology was scrambling to get ahead of the game.

AMD goes back to its past as it looks to the future… sounds like a good headline right? But it is not merely a headline, but a reality in that AMD has done what we predicted they would do back in November 2011 when we talked about the direction that AMD was moving in. AMD is putting together an R&D consortium like they had when they were developing the Opteron and a few other products. At the time the think tank involved companies like Motorola, Texas Instrument, IBM, and even Samsung. Now the players are different, but the goal is the same.

AMD has finally signed the predicted license deal with ARM to incorporate some of ARM’s technology into AMD’s APUs. This was a move that we saw coming back in Q3 of 2011. Around the time when Rory Reed took over the helm at AMD we anticipated the shift to mobile computing. It was Reed’s big push at Lenovo while he was there and we did not expect anything less from him at AMD.

At CES 2010 we watched as the “PC” world began to gear up for its onslaught into the tablet market. Many at the time were still claiming that Apple was going to hold the market simply because they had a very big foot hold (and still do). However as we watched press briefings from Asus, Lenovo, nVidia, AMD, and Intel we saw something very interesting; the move to tablets that make sense for everyone. We are not talking about the choice of OS here either.

You would think today was a slow news day as we see people reporting on something we talked about almost a month ago (well really more than that). It seems that people are waking up from the haze of all of the news about Windows on ARM (Windows RT) and starting to realize that x86/64 tablets are going to be much, much more attractive to both consumers, businesses and both manufacturers and developers.

We have had quite a bit on Microsoft’s next operating system here on the site including gaming performance, Internet Explorer 10 and the Metro UI (which we still do not particularly like). After tinkering around with Windows 8 and seeing the potential underneath we do get that even if Windows 8 is not a blockbuster it will change the way that the tablet market works forever.

One of my favorite movies is the move “Heat”  (for multiple reasons) in this movie there is a scene where Tone Loc is talking to Al Pacino about one of the “bad guys” he makes a very telling comment; “But he goes on and on running down to me about how he ain't been doing nothin' and nothin's been going on and all this other bullshit, so right then and there I know: this cat's got somethin' goin' down.” The same can be said about companies and people that tell you how great things are all the time. This is what we are seeing in a rash of articles about how great the New iPad is and how Apple will dominate the market (tablet market) until 2016… This is odd as only a couple of weeks ago it was only through 2013.

As I made my rounds this morning (checking out what the rest of the world thinks is going on in technology) I stumbled across a couple of articles that had my laughing. One of them was just more of what I have been hearing since 1997, the PC is going away. I honestly do not know how some analyst firms can even print this any longer. The PC has been a fixture in the home and work place for so long and it is such an integrated fixture in how people do work that it is very unlikely you will see the PC go away. Still we see this almost every quarter despite both many “PC” related companies posting record quarters and PC sales actually being up between 2-4%.

The New iPad is having a VERY rough time for a new Apple product. Even the iPhone 4 with its “antennagate” issue has not gotten as much press for so many problems. The first one that was brought to our attention was the heating issue. This little problem has been vilified and explained away by multiple sites. However, there is no mistaking the fact that under usage the New iPad runs up to 13 degrees hotter than the iPad2. Apple and others have tried to say it is an increase in the number of LEDs that are used for backlighting and that is plausible, but we should also look at the fact that you have a larger battery, beefier charging system, twice the number of GPU cores (4 PowerVR SGX 543s) and also twice the amount of memory under the hood. All of this adds up in a way that the Apple engineers appear to have missed. But the heat issue is not the only problem that has been brought up this week alone.