Microsoft Announcing New Surface 3

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
Today, Microsoft introduces the new Surface 3, powered by the recently announced Intel® Atom™ x7 processor, the highest performing processor in the Intel Atom™ product family. The Intel Atom x7 processor doubles the graphics performance over the prior generation processor. Surface 3 is the thinnest and lightest Surface yet and is optimized to run Windows and Office at an affordable price.
 
FYI yellow text on the white mobile background is A+ killer awesome.
 
k1pp3r said:
Go PRO or Go Home!

The Pro is where it's at.
Click to expand...

The new Surface 3 is smaller, thinner, lighter and should have a good bit more battery life. It's going to depend on how well the new Cherry Trail Atom performs.
 
TwiceOver said:
It was.

I'm considering getting one. Would like actual reviews first though. The price is a little high IMO though once you add all the accessories.
Click to expand...

Forbes seemed to like it. Though I still fall into the Pro or go home camp, this one actually looks like a reasonable buy and not the FU consumer the RT ones were
 
Now why not just release this with a Surface Pro 4. Why stagger a lite version?
 
Spidey329 said:
Now why not just release this with a Surface Pro 4. Why stagger a lite version?
Click to expand...

Yeah, that was odd to me.

Either way, good to see the more affordable versions moving away from RT, which was an unmitigated disaster.

I wonder what the graphics performance is like in the x7. How will this thing run in Civ5's touch mode? :p
 
Zarathustra[H];1041521352 said:
I wonder what the graphics performance is like in the x7. How will this thing run in Civ5's touch mode? :p
Click to expand...

Bay Trail tablets seem to handle Civ 5 quite with touch well and the x7 has up to twice the GPU performance of Bay Trail so I would expect Civ 5 to be fine. A lot of older and non-compute intensive games should run well even if not at full resolution.
 
Hmm.

Here is my thought process.

I love the concept of an x86 tablet that can run my desktop software. Until the original Surface Pro was launched, I would never even consider a tablet for this reason.

The Surface Pro line would be topping my shopping list if I were in the market for a new laptop or tablet. But I'm not.

I have a high end (but aging) desktop. Work provides me with a HP ultrabook. I have an android phone. I don't NEED another device.

If I'm home, I'll use the desktop.
If I'm on the road and need to do something I can't (or is inconvenient) on my phone, and plan ahead, I have my work laptop.
For everything else when I'm on the go, I use my phone.

I'm just not sure what a tablet adds for me.

$800 was a little steep for something I don't need.

$499 is much better, but still on the steep end for something I really don't need.

So, I probably still won't get one.

But I'm closer to getting one than I've ever been.
 
Hmm..

So here's a problem that raises the price of this thing.

64GB version gets 2GB RAM.

128GB version gets 4GB RAM.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that the RAM is not user upgradeable.

This pretty much forces one into the 128GB version, and increases the cost to $599...

Can't do shit with 2GB on x86 these days, at least not in Windows.

Now Linux on the other hand...
 
One of the targeted markets for Surface 3 is educational so it makes sense to announce before school starts.

x7 with 16 execution units should be even better than z3795 with 4. Here's z3795 playing Civ5.

https://youtu.be/UIw1NoNo5_4
 
Zarathustra[H];1041521393 said:
Can't do shit with 2GB on x86 these days, at least not in Windows.

Now Linux on the other hand...
Click to expand...

Have to disagree owning several Bay Trail 2G RAM devices. These devices are sufficiently capable of running a lot of desktop software well, even older and lighter weight PC games. Of course larger and more intensive software and lots of multitasking isn't going work well.
 
I was about to order a Surface Pro 3 the other day and they raised the prices back up again to their original prices. They keep doing this bullshit every other week.
 
heatlesssun said:
Have to disagree owning several Bay Trail 2G RAM devices. These devices are sufficiently capable of running a lot of desktop software well, even older and lighter weight PC games. Of course larger and more intensive software and lots of multitasking isn't going work well.
Click to expand...

Do you have to run an antivirus on these windows tablets? If so, I could see 2 GB as too limiting.
 
DocSavage said:
Do you have to run an antivirus on these windows tablets? If so, I could see 2 GB as too limiting.
Click to expand...

Windows 8.x has built-in Windows Defender anti-malware and anti-virus. Booting into Windows 8.x uses a little over 1GB so the 2GB model is adequate for the cost conscious student. If cost isn't an issue the 4GB model allows more headroom.
 
pxc said:
$500?!?!?! Someone needs to make a Spanish laughing guy video for this.

FWIW, this is the Atom x7: http://ark.intel.com/products/85475/Intel-Atom-x7-Z8700-Processor-2M-Cache-up-to-2_40-GHz
Click to expand...

Obviously we don't have any real world performance yet on these new Atoms but my guess is that the performance is going to surprise a lot of folks. As for the price, for what this device does and it's quality, there's not really anything cheaper. Sure there's cheaper laptops and tablets but this is in essence a fully functional computer that weighs 1.37 lbs and is rated on paper for up to 10 hours of video playback.
 
If the quality is the same as the Surface Pro 3 then it'll far surpass anything in its price range. Quality even exceeds Apple since Microsoft use magnesium and not mass produced corrosion prone bleacher aluminum. You're talking about a $499 semi-pro tool that costs less than $599 iPad toy with similar storage configuration.
 
WTF!? I was hoping that this Windows 8 Shite! was another April Fools joke.

:(
 
At first I thought this only ran Windows RT. This is actually pretty amazing.
 
This is an amazing little device. Probably the best going to college thing ive seen.

Full Windows, Good Screen, decent performance, tablet working pen input, $500/$600...

College kids these days are so spoiled.
 
Okay, why the fuck does this only have a three-position kickstand while the Pro has multi-position.
 
heatlesssun said:
Have to disagree owning several Bay Trail 2G RAM devices. These devices are sufficiently capable of running a lot of desktop software well, even older and lighter weight PC games. Of course larger and more intensive software and lots of multitasking isn't going work well.
Click to expand...

I run a lot of legacy GOG games on my WinBook TW801, and I'm constantly astonished how well it performs. Yes, you're not going to use it for current-gen gaming or content creation, but it's handled almost everything work-related I've thrown at it. (it had issues running the h.323/sip videoconferencing application we use- totally drained the battery, even plugged in) I don't have to lug a 7lb laptop to work anymore- and I'm very thankful for this little guy.
 
I would buy it right now if I knew the screen was as sensitive as the SP3 anyone know?
 
Epic| said:
FYI yellow text on the white mobile background is A+ killer awesome.
Click to expand...

The mobile background is white?
That's really wasteful in terms of battery life for those with OLED mobile displays.
 
dbu8554 said:
I would buy it right now if I knew the screen was as sensitive as the SP3 anyone know?
Click to expand...

I seem to remember MS buying the digitizer company (N-Trig) they used in the SP3, so I would strongly suspect it is using their now in-house digitizer tech.
 
Saturn_V said:
I run a lot of legacy GOG games on my WinBook TW801, and I'm constantly astonished how well it performs. Yes, you're not going to use it for current-gen gaming or content creation, but it's handled almost everything work-related I've thrown at it. (it had issues running the h.323/sip videoconferencing application we use- totally drained the battery, even plugged in) I don't have to lug a 7lb laptop to work anymore- and I'm very thankful for this little guy.
Click to expand...

It is kind of difficult to imagine that Windows, an OS that has a reputation by some of being big and bloated, can ran well doing many tasks on hardware equivalent to a higher end smartphone, even desktop apps one might not even expect would run well but do in reality.

Cherry Trail's biggest improvements over Bay Trail are in the GPU. It would be interesting to see if a Cherry Trail device would handle your video conferencing app better.

dbu8554 said:
I would buy it right now if I knew the screen was as sensitive as the SP3 anyone know?
Click to expand...

The digitizer in the Surface 3 and Pro 3 are pretty much the same. The pens are interchangeable so would expect overall the same inking performance and experience to be similar except in the more intensive situations where the Pro has more computational power.

I'm sure plenty of people will be reviewing Photoshop, OneNote and all of the usual suspects that are popular with pens.
 
If it came with keyboard and pen I'd get one... It's not worth it after you add on all the accessories.
 
It's dumb-face expensive and even worse if you add a keyboard and the pen. I hope this isn't an indicator of how overpriced the upcoming Atom tablets are in general because I was really hoping to see another iteration of $100-200 tablets but with a faster GPU.
 
heatlesssun said:
It is kind of difficult to imagine that Windows, an OS that has a reputation by some of being big and bloated, can ran well doing many tasks on hardware equivalent to a higher end smartphone, even desktop apps one might not even expect would run well but do in reality.
Click to expand...

The only people who keep saying Windows is bloated are Linux users who last used it when XP was still the top of the line. Believe it or not, windows has been getting smaller and more lean since vista.
 
Ryokurin said:
The only people who keep saying Windows is bloated are Linux users who last used it when XP was still the top of the line. Believe it or not, windows has been getting smaller and more lean since vista.
Click to expand...

As a Linux user, I totally agree with the fact that Windows feels faster on equal hardware. I've got two netbooks, one's an Asus 1005HAB with an Atom n270 running Mint 17.1 from a 32GB compact flash card on a 2.5 inch SATA adapter and the other is a Dell Latitude 2110 with an Atom n470 - it's like an school and institution-targeted netbook that's sorta heavier and more ruggedized. Both have 2GB of RAM (yay!). The Dell has Windows 7 Pro on it right now, but before settling into 7, I went through Mint 17.1, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Lubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Netbooks being super slow to begin with really bring the differences in performance to light between operating systems. Ubuntu was basically unusable because of how slow it was to navigate the UI. Mint 17.1 was more tolerable, but there were some annoying latencies. There's a rotating background image on the login screen that's new to 17.1 that wasn't in 17.0 and the image resolutions are so high that the computer chugs really badly to load them which makes typing a password really bad. There's like a 2-3 second wait between typing something and keystrokes registering on screen. I fixed it on the Asus by shrinking the background images to 30-50% of their original size, but ugh...annoying! Opening Firefox results in an unresponsive browser for about 5 seconds before you can start typing in a URL. Once things are settled in, its' okay, but Adblock and Noscript set to be really aggressive, caching to RAM only, along with disabling most extensions like Flash (which I'd do to keep creeper Google out anyway) are necessary to make most ad-infested sites load quickly. Mint is otherwise mostly usable and since my Asus' storage solution is a tiny camera memory card, I'm sticking with Mint on it. Windows would be faster. I didn't wanna deal with it on the Dell soooo...

Lubuntu was pretty responsive from a UI perspective on the Latitude netbook, but it had the same problems with web browsing and program execution. Since the computer is licensed to Win 7 Pro and I still need MS Office for college papers, I just installed it and Office 2010. Even with an AV suite, it feels more responsive. Yup, its still not fast. Web browsing in IE11 demands patience sometimes (also not loading Flash and liberally dumping known advertiser URLs into your restricted sites list based on their cookies you find in your cache folder) but it is a smoother feeling experience on the same hardware.

I think the differences are a lot less significant on more modern, powerful hardware so a lot of Linux community sorts don't notice the performance hit even when they use Windows alongside Linux distros. There's also the argument that lightweight distros are more efficient than Windows (which is true and I think Lubuntu was at least competitive with 7 from my experiences with it recently) but the UI isn't as pretty and mainstream Linux distros aren't better out of the box. Yup, you can configure them, but there's the pain of doing dumb stuff like resizing login screen rotating background images that are kinda stupid to implement in the first place and the time it takes to investigate how to make those adjustments along with the potentially lost capabilities in the case of ultra-light distros like Puppy or TinyCore (*shudder*).

Of course, Linux is compelling in other ways when compared to Windows so it still has advantages that make it worth using. I don't have to worry about software licenses. I'm not "highly encouraged" to connect it to my e-mail account so I can access cloud features I think are totally creepy and invasive and the update process is fairly unified, reliable, and efficient. It's a lot of tradeoffs, but I think the performance argument isn't relevant anymore. Neither is the whole "it never crashes" thing that used to be popular too. Security through obscurity is a dumb argument since it's not really security so that isn't very valid either. It doesn't mean people aren't gonna champion that stuff, but considering how people also believe that anarchy is valid or think that the libertarian party leaders like the Koch brothers actually act in accordance with what they preach, I think you're gonna always see a certain level of clueless ranting in the world. :)
 
Ryokurin said:
The only people who keep saying Windows is bloated are Linux users who last used it when XP was still the top of the line. Believe it or not, windows has been getting smaller and more lean since vista.
Click to expand...

Lets see:

Linux:
Last week I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my HTPC for XBMC use.

Installing from my USB stick took maybe 5-10 minutes.

Updating to the latest versions of everything online, took maybe another 10 minutes.

This resulted in everything installed (including all software and drivers) updated with all the latest patches in less than 20 minutes using less than 5GB on the main partition, rebooting only once.



Windows 8:
Last night I decided to do a clean install of Windows 8 on the gaming partition of my Desktop (I dual boot, Linux for most things, Windows for games, and that games partition has been around, well, almost since the launch of Windows 7)

I started as soon as I got home from work (~5pm)

Installed windows 8 (reboot like 4 times)

Went to windows update, to download and install patches (reboot like 3 times) and waiting over an hour for almost 100 patches to install.

Troubleshooting to try to figure out why the hell the upgrade to 8.1 refuses to install.

Finally downloading a 4GB 8.1 recovery disk using "mediacreationtool.exe" in order to force it to upgrade, off of Microsoft's shitty servers at less than 10mbit per second.

Download completes, but for some reason fails to write the recovery files to my USB stick. That's OK, it cached the files it downloaded right? WRONG. Re-run "mediacreationtool.exe" and re-download the 4GB again (this time writing it to an iso, so at least I have the file if something goes wrong)

Wait for mediacreationtool.exe to convert the files into an ISO and burn to disk. (thinking to myself, wow, I haven't been forced to burn an ISO to install something in a very very long time)

Installing said 8.1 upgrade reboot 4 more times

Woot, another 60 or so patches. Way too much time and a few more reboots later, now I can finally get to hunting down, and individually downloading each driver package and installing it.

Giving up and going to bed because it is after midnight, and I have to be up for work in 6 hours.

In the end, I have a functioning system (drivers installed, but no software yet) after having worked on it for 7 hours, and god knows how many reboots that uses ~40GB on my main partition.


Conclusion:
I'm sorry, but I am going to have to disagree with your assertion.

Linux is WAY more efficient than windows.

It uses disk space more efficiently (by an order of magnitude!) it uses RAM more efficiently and it MOST CERTAINLY uses my time more efficiently.

It is by far a sleeker, easier to use system where I don't hae to hunt for drivers and software, as everything I need is right there. Stuff just works. And it just works quickly.

The entire time I was installing windows I was in disbelief how painful the process was compared to Linux.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041522951 said:
Lets see:
Click to expand...

I agree with the disk space thing. Windows uses more capacity, but 40GB...huh? There are Win 8.1 devices shipping with a compressed OS image and 32GB of storage space that still have ~14GB free (or more) and that includes OEM junkware plus Office. Yup, Linux is better. Mint 17.1 uses like less than 6GB.

As far as OS installs are concerned, those happen like once in a blue moon for most people so while they're painful (OMG Windows 7 and Office 2010 needed multitudes of patches and reboots...plus some of the patches failed to install multiple times if they were installed in conjunction with other patches and it takes painfully forever even on relatively modern hardware, let along anemic netbook CPUs) and Linux updates are far superior in that sense, a bare metal build doesn't happen that often.

Also, did you know that LinuxLive USB Creator claims to support a the creation of a bootable thumb drive. Also I think Microsoft has a USB thumb drive creator so the whole burning an image to a DVD isn't really necessary.

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Also, did you know that LinuxLive USB Creator claims to support a the creation of a bootable thumb drive. Also I think Microsoft has a USB thumb drive creator so the whole burning an image to a DVD isn't really necessary.
Click to expand...

Oh, I know, under normal circumstances I wouldn't have burned it. The windows 8 install overwrote my grub bootloader though, so getting back into linux to use the bootable USB from ISO creator wasn't an immediate option.

I also didn't feel like goggling around trying to find an other obscure piece of software just to write it to my usb stick. I mean the mediacreationtool.exe (or whatever it is called) was supposed to do it on it's own, but failed to write it to the stick for some reason, forcing me to do it again. I was at the point where I had wasted enough time trying new things, and decided to cut my losses and do what I knew worked.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top