AMD's Hondo Chip 'A Windows 8 Product' 229
dgharmon points out comments from AMD's Steve Belt, who was asked about the company's upcoming Hondo APU. Hondo is their biggest attempt to date to break into the tablet market, and they're doing so with a distinct focus on Windows 8. Belt said, "This is a Windows 8 product, only. We're not doing Android on this platform, at least not now. ... It is a conscious decision not to go after Android. We think the Windows 8 space has a lot of opportunity, there's plenty of TAM [total addressable market] there for us to go at. So we don't need to spread ourselves into other markets, we think Windows 8 is a great place to start. Down the road we may look at Android, right now we're focused on Windows 8." The article adds, "With both AMD and Intel readying Hondo and Clover Trail respectively for Windows 8 and pushing their respective customers to come up with designs at roughly the same time, it will be interesting to see just how many Windows RT tablets will appear at the operating system's launch. However one thing is clear, neither AMD nor Intel will have Android x86 tablets running with their respective next generation ultra low voltage chips." Fortunately, there's nothing stopping users and manufacturers from running other OSes on Hondo.
Re:Windows 8 (Score:4, Informative)
I think this is a little naive. No company would intentionally engineer a failure of a product. That's not what Microsoft has ever done. Rather Microsoft has been releasing service packs as new operating systems.
Windows 1.0 flop
Windows 2.xx flop
Windows 3.0 flop
Windows 3.1 success
Windows 3.11 flop
Windows NT 3.51 flop
Windows NT 4 success (Note several service packs)
Windows NT 5 (Windows 2000) flop
Windows NT 5.1 (XP) success (Note several service packs)
Windows NT 6.0 (Vista) flop
Windows NT 6.1 (Windows 7) success
Also the 95 eras...
Windows 4.0 (95) success
95 OSR1, OSR2, OSR2.5 OEM versions were better
Windows 98 flop (MSIE integration)
Windows 98SE success
Windows 4.9 (ME) flop
It may look like every second version is a flop, but that's not what's going on here.
Windows 2000 lacked compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.x and Windows 9x games
Windows Vista lacked compatibility with software unaware of UAC, changed the driver models, first OS that multicore works out of the box, first 64bit version available at retail, etc
A lot of complaints about Vista are the same complaints leveled at 2000, 95 and 3.0, that some compatibility was broken. But Microsoft has completely done away with this game with Windows 8 and went "You write it for the managed C runtimes using Metro interface or you don't play at all", The last time this happened was with Windows 95. Yes applications for Windows 3.1 could be installed on Windows 95, but the Windows 3.1 program and file managers were still available if you migrated. Those applications will NOT install onto a 64bit windows no matter what.
A Windows 8 slate/tablet/whateverthehellitwillbe... is not going to succeed because it doesn't run iOS apps. It's also not going to run x86 Windows 7 apps either. Apple leveraged their existing iPhone developer base to bring out the iPad, but when the iPhone originally was released, people were predicting it would fail. You want to know why that is? It's because the entire interface was different. Microsoft is in effect copying this change in interface (not the interface itself) and if it succeeds, you can kiss away the Windows and Mac PC land as all consumer devices will be come walled gardens, and the only people who still have a full sized PC will be the same people who 30 years ago had a minicomputer or a type writer. Us old-people.
But all is not lost. Content production will still require a Mac or PC, as storage has not yet caught up. We're maxing out at 64GB for a tablet device, because it's simply not possible to put any more NAND flash in a device, if it's made any smaller, it wears out faster. Memistors and other next generation solid-state memory is close to production so this might just be a temporary plateau in storage sizes while the next stuff is mass produced.
Camera devices haven't been completely eliminated by camera phones, because the DSLR people won't let go of their super-sized lenses. But all the point-and-shoots, no more need for those. You only need a separate camera now if you're a Pro video/photographer.
What about android? Will since Oracle had it's ass kicked, that leads to some promise, but I think Android's days are numbered unless some kind of "One Android" standard is created. Remember back in the days of "IBM PC compatible" ? This is what we're facing. A pile of devices that are not compatible because they don't run the same CPU let alone any other piece of hardware. It would make sense, for Google to dump the current naming system in favor of something more straight forward, eg Android 4, Android 5. And the Android markets need to get a hardware profile from the device before sending it a version that works on that device configuration or tell the user that they must update to the latest version (and where to get it) before downloading. Anyone who was using a PC back in 1986 can tell you how much of a pain in the ass it was to configure DOS until Windows 98 came along and all games started being made for DirectX. The only stuff that worked out of the box were self-booting games from around the Dos 3 era.
Re:Windows 8 (Score:5, Informative)
Vista didn't "succeed in the market". It was the next iteration of a monopoly that dates back to DOS. They only thing it needed to do in order to "succeed" was just show up. Except it didn't quite work that way. No. Vista managed to fail despite of it's market advantages. People and companies avoided it in droves. Hardware vendors offered downgrades to XP.
A monpoly product is a failure when people actively avoid it for the previous version.
They couldn't even force feed Vista to people.
Vista was responsible for XP continuing to linger on until the next version of Windows was released.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)