Windows tablets

any of you have tablet or laptop with Windows 8 with Bing?

my lil bro have that and the windows 10 upgrade offer did not appear. Hmm. Is the way the OS is built preventing MS to upgrading them?

it use some kind of windows image instead of windows installation.

 

yea seems I'm wrong , but they are still 1080p for $300 I don't think you will find a windows tablet with that mix of resolution , thinness and battery life.

 

Perhaps its related to my issue, though prolly not (windows 8.1 needs to be installed not win 8 btw)

I have win 8.1 on my HDD and it was showing the icon to register to upgrade to win 10
anyways a few days ago, I got a new SSD which I want to put windows on, so I install win 8 on it, in preparation for win 10 release.
And now the win 10 upgrade offer is gone from my windows 8 on HDD.
Im not gonna worry about it until win 10 launches which is in just over a month, but I hope Im not in the bad book for installing the same windows twice (on the same PC)

 

I do have one, and the W10 upgrade didn't appear.
In fact, it didn't appear in my W8.1 desktop and HTPC either. It only appeared on my W7 laptop.
Except for the tablet, all my Windows licenses are from MSDNAA. Maybe that's the reason?

 

@ToTTenTranz probably, im also with MSDNAA but on windows 7 and it did not appear :/

 

Intel just announced most of the Skylake lineup (they're leaving the 72 EU parts for a later date) and the 15W parts with 48 EUs and 64MB EDRAM are confirmed.

Seeing how Microsoft is reportedly going to keep using 15W SoCs with the Pro range, they'd be really stupid not to use these, at least for the more expensive options.

 

Didn't MS use 9W CPUs with custom firmware to allow them to run @ 15W TDP ?

Anyway, seems like a nobrainer for higher end Surface Pros and Macbook Airs alike.

Kudos to Intel for roughly halving the power consumption of the lowest TDP Iris Pro solutions from 28W to 15W.

Cheers

 

Nop, the Surface Pro 3 uses the i3-4020Y (11.5W), i5-4300U (15W) and i7-4650U (15W).

I would risk to say those devices are the very reason why Intel is spending more die area and power budget in their lower-power solutions.

It is a great upgrade but to be fair, there's a significant difference in manufacturing (22nm -> 2nd gen 14nm), the EDRAM amount was halved and it's been over 2 years since the release of the CPUs the Pro 3 is using right now.

 

For the power envelope we're discussing, the amount of eDRAM isn't halved, because there was no eDRAM SKUs in the past with 15W TDP.

The new cache architecure means the GPU won't thrash the LLC. The amount of EUs set an upper limit to gaming resolution (on a framerate normalized basis) which again sets an upper limit to eDRAM usage (G-buffer, Z-buffers for shadowmaps etc).

IMO, it seems very well balanced.

Cheers

 

I never said it was unbalanced, just that the GPU doesn't seem like a huge miraculous upgrade from the 2 year-old 15W Haswell model with the Iris 5000 -> especially considering Intel's manufacturing advantage.
It's certainly not the kind of performance boosts we've been seeing with low-power SoCs, for example.

 

Here's a trick that might help: have a 2nd look on Sofia specifications, raise an eyebrow, now go back to the fore mentioned platform and wipe tears of joy from eyes

 

Yeah SofiA is a really boring platform.

 

None of the 15W Haswells had eDRAM. If you look at performance comparison between Iris HD5000 and Iris Pro HD5200 (eDRAM), you'll find somewhere between 50% and 150% better performance for the HD5200 for a 18% higher clockrate.

I'd expect a 48EU+eDRAM Skylake to be around twice as fast as a 40EU HD5000 Haswell in graphics heavy tasks.

Cheers

 

The bets are on then, because I doubt that will be the case at all

The "same" models with Iris Pro 5200 had huge performance differences between them because they were heavily dependent on the chip's TDP.
Just check the performance difference between the mobile 47W 4750HQ and the desktop 65W 4770R (e.g. the GRID 2 scores, they have the same settings).

Intel's higher-end mobile iGPUs on Haswell were very TDP-limited, specially the 5200 but even the EDRAM-less Iris 5000 was too.
I guess that Skylake will make it a lot better, but I wouldn't count on such a big jump in performance between the 15W models.

Maybe if Intel had developed a SoC with ~2-2.5GHz Airmont cores and a GT3e GPU within a 15W power envelope then the GPU could have enough power to spread its wings a bit.
But with Skylake cores in there I doubt the GPU will get its proper space.

 

October 6 for Surface Pro 4:

 

Just noticed that you'll be able to watch the event live on the Xbox. Hoping for some real innovation and an attractive price point.

 

Don't count on the attractive price part. The Surface Pro line has never been cheap, given as it's a high end device.

What they could do is lower the price of the Surface 3. Getting the 4GB RAM model to $450 or lower would be a blast, and they would still make a hefty profit out of it.

 

Wonder if MS will showcase their ARM mobile version of W10 on 6th October?

 

There is rumor that it will be offered at the current Surface Pro 3 reduced price point. If so, that is fairly attractive for me. If not, I guess I may have to go with the mid-tier option. I'm looking to stay around $1000 or so.

 

Half of the event will be about Windows Phone aka Windows 10 Mobile (which is already available to anybody through the Windows Insiders program)