Reviews - Pro-Clockers! PC Reviews One MegaHertz At A Time

One of the ongoing themes in the last two years of our coverage of Microsoft is that the company's mobile strategy is a mess. The smartphone situation has just begun to turn around with Windows Phone 7 but for tablets and even netbooks, Windows is too big, too bloated, and has a monstrously unsuitable UI. So everyone's in agreement that Microsoft needs to do a lot more on the tablet front than just insist that some combination of desktop Windows plus a stylus is good enough. But part of Microsoft's problem is that there's currently no x86-based tablet hardware that can compete in battery life with ARM tablets.

Perlmutter basically said (and I paraphrase from memory here) that Microsoft has a long ways to go on the tablet software front, and that an ARM port will help them get there. And, by the time they get their tablet software sorted—a fresh, tablet-centric UI and much-needed power optimizations—Intel will be ready with an Atom-based chip that can compete directly with ARM in the milliwatt power draw range.

Right now, Atom is significantly more power-hungry (and more high-performance) than the ARM Cortex A8-caliber hardware that's showing up in Android tablets. But Intel will continue to close that gap with each new process generation. So, by the time Moore's Law delivers an Atom SoC with the same power profile as A8- and A9-based SoCs, Microsoft will either be ready with a tablet-worthy OS, or it will be further along than it would've been if it had been waiting for Intel to catch up.

 

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