ThisIsMyNext: Microsoft's Quad-core Tablet

[molman]

Originally Posted by CleverClothe

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIP6EwqMEoE&t=17s

Haha. Ah The Princess Bride how I treasure thee.

Looking forward to the BUILD Conference when we'll get to hear some more information. Curious if the ARM version of Windows will have a full desktop shell (explorer.exe) or just the new touch Metro inspired interface.

The second tablet isn't all that interesting except for businesses that likely have existing investment in x86 world/Windows development and Apps. Also those out of order Atom processors still aren’t there to my mind for power vs. performance when compared to ARM's offerings. Here's a better picture of it (Fujitsu Stylistic Q550) for those interested;



BTW, I find the why all the core comments interesting when Apple's iPad is likely to be quadcore next year (if A6 rumours are to be believed). Wonder if the same questions will be asked then? Anyway as long as the cores can be intelligently shut off/throttled as needed for battery conservation I personally don't see an issue with it. The shared screen snapping and multitasking of the new shell is looking interesting so I can see all those cores being put to work, as I also can for gaming which is another play MS could make. It would side step all those Xbox Portable speculation that pops up every now and then, and considering that the Playstation Vita is pretty much off the shelf parts it seems like a real possibility.

I’m kind of hoping Microsoft does comes out with a decent offering so that we can continue to have competition in the market moving forward, better for all of us if there are more competitive players in the market.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Barty

I have a six core desktop. Most of the time, 4 of the cores just sit there idle.

At what speed are they running?
It is probably cheaper to go quadruple core at 1Ghz than dual at 2Ghz.
Also, tablets are supposed to run many apps in the background. The antivirus and mail are probably always there, if you start adding facebook, twitter, google+ in parallel to some games, you just might end up using 4 cores.

[CleverClothe]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

At what speed are they running?
It is probably cheaper to go quadruple core at 1Ghz than dual at 2Ghz.
Also, tablets are supposed to run many apps in the background. The antivirus and mail are probably always there, if you start adding facebook, twitter, google+ in parallel to some games, you just might end up using 4 cores.

Good point. Also, the latest IE takes better advantage of multiple cores, and I think Chrome and Firefox do too.

[molman]

Originally Posted by CleverClothe

Good point. Also, the latest IE takes better advantage of multiple cores, and I think Chrome and Firefox do too.

I think from memory Firefox is single threaded but now has multithreaded plugin instances which are in their own containers. Chrome is definitely multithreaded (believe first browser to be such?), and I further think you are right re: latest IE (v9). Thing to remember though is it is still for the OS to manage the handling of all those threads, but yes multicore (physical or virtual if you count things like hyper-threading) is normally a boon for multitasking, and more applications are taking advantage of it as time passes (some games, CAD etc.. programs). Though just as interesting is the offloading of some tasks to the GPU which has certain architectural affordances that give it an advantage in some areas - lots of untapped potential in our systems with hardware that is often ahead of software.