Dell Launches $499 Windows 8 Tablet

[tleavit]

I sat with a dell VP in my office just yesterday and told him that they are missing out on millions of sales on their tablets. There is one thing that's holding our business up and its the fact that they are only giving us x32 devices.

 

[Wisecracker]

C'mon, Hondo (and Kabini) --

 

[misterawsome]

why are all these tablet makers not getting that their main advantage to the general public over the ipad is the price, just because apples tablet is $500 doesn't mean yours have to be

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]tiltowait[/nom]Direct competitor to Surface RT? Atom based tablet has battery life rivaling Surface RT and slightly better performance. Combined that with able to run all applications, one cannot help but think that maybe the whole RT fork is nothing but a distraction in the long run.[/citation]First of all they had to make Windows RT, to push Intel to provide efficient and AFFORDABLE x86 chips. If they didn't have RT and Surface, Intel's prices for tablet chips would be higher. They were porting the NT kernel to ARM anyway for WP8, so there was a lot of development synergy there.

Also keep in mind that ARM SoCs are improving at a rapid pace, and as more and more impressive chips hit the market, there will be a place for future WinRT consumer tablets. Plus it keeps Intel's prices in check, although in the future hopefully AMD's tablet chips will help a lot in that department.

That brings up one final point, however. Intel is using outdated graphics. I'm not sure if it is a power problem, thermal issue, or what. But instead of using 2-4 current PowerVR cores like Apple, they're using a single slightly older core (although they did clock it pretty high). Even though Tegra 3 is rather outdated, on the graphics front Tegra 3 still wins. This Intel tablet is just not good for games, this go around (and probably for the forseeable future).

I'm hoping a Temash tablet will come out soon to bring both x86 and decent graphics to tablets.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]tleavit[/nom]I sat with a dell VP in my office just yesterday and told him that they are missing out on millions of sales on their tablets. There is one thing that's holding our business up and its the fact that they are only giving us x32 devices.[/citation]

How many customers of tablets would do anything where 32 bit memory addressing and such is a limiting factor? Heck, how many tablets are around that have more than 2GB of RAM and how many tablets even have enough performance in other areas for a lot of RAM to be useful?