Intel's Haswell Chips Pushing Windows RT Into Oblivion

SmartAboutThings sends this excerpt from Technology Personalized: "Intel has started shipping the fourth generation Haswell chips for tablets, which brings power-efficient processors and hence much better battery life to Windows tablets. According to IDG, Intel has now started shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors, including one that draws as little as 4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios. These new Haswell processors could go into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, bringing longer battery life to the devices. This is a great news for Windows lovers, who have had to sacrifice performance for battery life (and vice versa) until now. Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."

Re:Now..

[bloodhawk]

The millions of legacy apps that don't have to be rewritten as they would with an android device. The Advantage is massive, The OS is distant second in importance to the applications a user uses.

Re:specific usage scenarios

[Macman408]

Seriously. 4.5 watts is easily an order of magnitude higher than what you'd get from a power-efficient ARM SoC in the same scenario. Heck, 4.5W is higher than the PEAK power draw of many ARM chips. For scenarios like playing an MP3, mobile chips can measure more like 30 mW - over 2 orders of magnitude lower.

Re:Compare to a netbook

[TheRaven64]

I have an Asus TransformerPadSomethingWhateverTheSillyNameIs and it isn't too bulky as a laptop. The main advantages are that it has a really nice screen (1080p and useable outside on a sunny day) and a battery that lasts 10 hours without even trying to keep power consumption down, closer to 15 if I reduce screen brightness and so on. In terms of portability, with the keyboard attached it's twice as thick as the tablet, but the same other dimensions, so it's still easy to slip into pretty much anything that's big enough to carry a 10" tablet.

Android is great in the tablet mode, but it really starts to show that it was designed for phones when you start trying to do real work on it. Switching quickly between applications is cumbersome (e.g. if I'm writing something and want to refer to PDF documents or web pages for reference), far more so than on any other OS I've used (WebOS got this a bit better for tablets and I'm still bitter about HP mismanaging it into oblivion). I can see a market for Windows devices with this sort of form factor, and the whole Metro thing almost starts to make sense to me: when the screen's detached, the Android apps are all quite useable, but when it's attached to the keyboard and trackpad I'd like to have more traditional desktop apps available. That said, I've not used Windows on the desktop since Windows 2000 was state of the art and I've not used Metro except for briefly playing with devices owned by some friends at MSR, so it's entirely possible that I'd find both UIs completely frustrating...