Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa August 2013 | Page 64

TECH TALK

BY RUSSELL BENNETT

The Wintel
Whirlwind Rises
Intel is back

I

f you thought that the tablet and smartphone
wars may have been starting to settle,
prepare to have your mind blown over the
last half of this year. This, ladies and gents, is
really where the battle gets started...
Apple may have arrived in the market first,
and have been enormously successful too, make
no mistake. But that didn’t stop the upstart OS
made by none other than the gatekeeper of how
the world views the Internet today, Google,
coming in and turning the market upside down
with sales volumes easily outstripping the
pioneer’s efforts.
Apple alone, after all, can only produce a
finite number of products in any given month.
For real volume, spreading the platform around
over a variety of huge global electronics brands
will always win. Google is only now actually
releasing its own hardware design, but already
Android is easily the strongest player. User
experience debates aside.
The two biggest guns in technology for the last
two decades, however, have been conspicuous
in their relative silence. With Microsoft only
officially releasing Windows 8 late in 2012,
and tablets sporting the new Microsoft flagship
only hitting shelves early this year, one of these
monoliths had showed its hand. However this,
too, was only the initial warning shot. The really
large cannons had yet to even be loaded.
Windows 8 tablets are lovely to use, but the
real trick of this environment is the ability
to run not only the new breed of Windows
Store apps, but “legacy” software as well.
62

August 2013 SA Real Estate Investor

Any application which the desktop version
of the software will run, the tablet iteration
can handle too. The only drawback being
that this version of Windows 8 runs best on
Intel architecture, resulting in table ts which
are quite pricey even compared to the Apple
competitors. Trickily enough, Windows 8 also
comes in an RT flavour, which happens to be
the only version that supports the more popular
ARM processors. So you could either have
pricey but appealing, or cheaper but limited to a
level of functionality not all that superior to an
Android-powered device.
Which is probably why Windows 8 tablets
haven’t really had the impact we might have
expected as yet, and is stuck struggling to
catch up.
The old Wintel alliance is a force which
cannot be counted out early though. In June
this year, Intel demoed its own reference tablet
designs built on the brand-new Bay Field SoC
(System on Chip) architecture. In short, quadcore Intel Atom CPUs running at 2.1 GHz
backed up by some major GPU f irepower
replacing the PowerVR SGX 544. Intel’s own
7th-gen Ivy Bridge GPUs in fact, which deliver
graphics horsepower of between 3 and 4 times
the performance of the older part.
This means the new architecture has the
juice to power screens with a much higher
pixel density (PPI) than before, without any
performance concerns whatsoever. A hiccup
which even the mighty Apple had to face up
to with the iPad 3, and the reason why this
generation was so quickly sidelined and updated.

The high resolution the Retina display of iPad
3 is capable of asked too much of the chipset it
was first paired with, causing both performance
problems and quite severe battery drain. Apple
could counter the latter by squeezing in a larger
cell, but the former was only fixed with an
upgraded hardware architecture.
Windows 8 with Bay Field SoCs will have
no such hurdles to overcome. What’s more,
these latest parts are also built using the latest
fabrication techniques, a move to a 22nm die
size means more power with even less power
consumption, less heat to manage, and an
even more compact package to design around.
The huge network of partners this formidable
alliance has built in the desktop space over the
years are having a field day with designs around
this architecture right now, and we’ll be able to
buy the first results very, very soon.
Which brings me to the killer. Not only will
these tablets be superb in terms of performance
and responsiveness, they’re going to be driving
the prices down too. Expect to be able to pick up
a Retina-matching display backed by this latest
Intel architecture and running a full version of
Windows 8 for Christmas 2013 in the R4000
price bracket.
The Wintel alliance is rising again, in the
mobile space this time. This pair of giants hasn’t
dominated the desktop PC environment for
going on three decades now for no reason. Don’t
think it beyond them now that they’ve teamed
up once more to become just as dominant in
mobile, regardless of the success of the iOS and
Android systems.
www.reimag.co.za