HP Reportedly Cancels Plans for Windows 7 Tablet 181
A recent post up at TechCrunch claims that HP's "Slate" tablet has been canceled. Officials details for the tablet were limited, though a leaked internal presentation indicated it had an 8.9" screen, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, and ran on Windows 7. Some are now speculating that HP may experiment with porting WebOS to a similar device. Quoting: "Will WebOS emerge as a successful operating system for tablet devices? That seems very unlikely given the dominance of the closed Apple OS and the likely success of the open Android and Chrome operating systems from Google. To get traction from third-party developers with WebOS, HP will need to sell a lot of units. And it's not clear what they'd gain from all that effort, anyway. HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."
Re:Who writes this crap? (Score:1, Informative)
They aren't well-known, but HP-UX, Tru64 and MP/E run some of the most critical and important computer systems in the world.
Re:Who writes this crap? (Score:3, Informative)
Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years (Score:5, Informative)
FTA: "HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. That would also rule out Windows 7 as an operating system." The Intel Atom has barely improved over the past two years. For the first year, it was paired up obsolete chipsets (945G, 945GSE), and only recently has Intel improved on that with Tiger Point. Still, the core has not changed (at least, I'm not aware of any announced changes), it's still manufactured at 45nm. When Intel announced their push to 32nm, many people speculated that the Atom would be the first to be manufactured because of it's simplicity. I guess it just wasn't profitable enough: Atom won't go 32nm until the second half of 2011 as Cedar Trail. The upcoming dual-core (dual die?) Atom netbook processor (N455) expected this summer will help, but it's probably too little, too late.
ARM and their partners, on the other hand, are barreling ahead. Single core Cortex A8 designs nearly reach performance parity with the Atom at about 1/4th the energy consumption, and dual-core A9 designs are being demonstrated now. (Nvidia's Tegra 2 comes to mind.)
Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Informative)
That was DEC and not HP. And DEC pretty much was destroyed by Compaq and then obliterated by HP.
Re:Who writes this crap? (Score:3, Informative)
And it wasn't owned by HP back in those days when it was quite popular...
Also their handhelds didn't run HP software...
Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years (Score:4, Informative)
Intel doesn't really want the Atom to improve. They don't want to give up any of the Atom sales to AMD, but what they really want is for everyone to buy more-expensive and more-upscale Intel CPUs such as Core Duo or i5.
Their problem is the Tegra 2. This is an 8-core chip that draws tiny amounts of power and yet is overall more powerful than the Atom. For half a Watt or less, you get an ARM 7 core (probably for "housekeeping"), two ARM 9 cores clocked at 1 GHz (with out-of-order execution and dual issue) for data processing, audio and graphics accelerator cores, video encode and decode cores, and an image processing core that can support a camera. This thing can decode HD movies in real time without even using the ARM 9 cores for anything!
The Apple iPad uses the Apple A4 chip, which is believed to be basically an ARM 8 core at 1 GHz. ARM 8 means no out-of-order or dual issue. So the iPad has a single 1 GHz core and a graphics accelerator, and it can already give a pretty good user experience; just think what people can do if they get multiple cores all working at once with the Tegra 2.
The Tegra 2 plus Android (and plus a Pixel Qi screen) is the combination to watch. Microsoft can't be happy; they want everyone to license the mobile Windows stack, but Android is both compelling and free, so that will be hard to compete with.
Intel can't be happy, because they have no way to keep the Tegra 2 from eating into the Atom market share. "Smartbook" computers and tablets will be better with a Tegra 2 because they will dissipate less heat (no need for a cooling fan) and use less battery life while getting more work done than is possible with an Atom. It's win/win/win, but you can't get it with Windows 7, you need mobile Windows or Linux, and it's going to be Linux (Android).
If Intel made a dual-core Atom on the 32 nanometer process, with an appropriately low-power chipset, not only would it go into netbooks but companies would start making desktop computers out of it. Why not? Get an "Energy Star" logo in the USA and sell them as "green" corporate computers or thin clients. Performance wouldn't be quite as good as a Core 2 Duo, but more than good enough, and Intel would be making less money because the margins are thinner on the Atom. Intel won't want that... (Remember Intel putting limits on how good a netbook can be? Screen can't be too big or touchscreen, can't have too much RAM, etc. Intel is trying to protect the market position of their mobile processors above the Atom.)
steveha