News - First Windows 8 Snapdragon PC by end of 2012

[HEXUS]

Quad-core Snapdragon-powered PCs by end of 2012, says Qualcomm.

Read more.

[crossy]

One of the biggest issues that Qualcomm faces though, which could seriously influence many potential buyers of Snapdragon-powered Windows 8 PCs and notebooks, is that it won’t be able to run legacy applications, which includes browsers, security tools and office suites.

Of course, where those "legacy" apps have source available presumably someone would be able to "merely" recompile it - e.g. LibreOffice.

That said, I would have thought security tools would have to be Windows8 specific, in which case, surely there'll be some means from Microsoft to be able to produce a Snapdragon-compatible binary from the project used to generate the "normal" x86 version.

Maybe the answer is some kind of "fat" package for Windows8 - able to deliver ARM or x86 code as appropriate. Can't see many mainstream games - e.g. BF3, Skyrim, etc - on ARM.

[kingpotnoodle]

ARM + Windows might have legs for tablets and long battery life laptops but for a desktop I'm not seeing it work.

If you want cheap there is Atom or Celeron, the latter should defintely outperform an ARM chip, and power draw on them is already quite minimal, one of my ITX Celeron boxes is <30W. I doubt many people would want to lose the flexibility of x86 for some minor power savings on a fixed plugged in device. Even if we assume these new chips don't suck worse than an Atom in Windows

Of course if the software ecosystem improves then the game changes...