Atom Windows 8 Tablet

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athlon1.2

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How slow are they? I'm sort of considering buying an HP Envy X2 but I'm not sure if it would be fast enough? I think I would mainly run Opera browser.
 
Should be fast enough for basic desktop stuff like Office and web browsing. I have the Samsung Ativ 500T based on the same Clover Trail platform and use it for these tasks daily with no performance issues. IE 10 however does run much better than any other browser I've tried, including Opera, especially when it comes to touch based browsing.
 
having used an atom with XP I would never in my life use one again with a newer OS....
 
I use a Ativ Smart PC (500T) and for day to day productivity work it's great. I typically have Chrome with 5-10 tabs open and then either OneNote, Word or PowerPoint depending on what I'm doing with no slow downs what so ever.

Really the limiting factor of the Clover Trail devices is disk I/O. The SSDs that are used with the chipset can be pretty slow. Again, they are fine for day-to-day use but I find if I am copying a large file (movie, VM image, etc) the device can slow down to a crawl.
 
Same here. I am a 2 week owner of the ThinkPad Tablet 2 and can attest that it runs basic productivity applications well (namely Office). I love the 8+ hour battery life and lighter physical weight (1.3lb). Others have reported either lag or struggles with more intensive apps like Photoshop (which is fine for me, personally, since I have stronger devices around the house to handle demanding tasks).

Even though it can load any x86 programs, I actually find myself not really using them in the TPT2. The ones that I want to run, like streaming live tv from Windows Media Center, is a choppy experience. Whereas the ones that run fine on the Atom is not really a highly desirable and/or poorly coded app to begin with.
 
I also have a thinkpad tablet 2 and yes it is slower than a conventional laptop and sometimes the lag pisses me off, but every day I use it i like it even more. My TP2 is up about from 8 am in the morning till 8pm at night. Throughout this time, it does get used about %65-%70 of the time and I get back home with about %5 charge left on the device. There is absolutely nothing else out there that can do that on one charge. The form factor is exceptionally good, weight is exceptionally good, heat dissapetation and quietness is exceptionally good, build quality is exceptionally good. I got the blue tooth keyboard for it, which is also very good and a full size fujitsu pen and currently I am loving my experience. Yes I wish that it was a bit more powerful but I would not trade a bit more cpu power to lose more than half of my battery life. If you don't mind being connected to a desk and occasionally taking your tablet to an other conference room or office for couple hours at a time, then yes, a surface pro may be the better choice. If you are mobile and do not want to constantly charge your tablet and use it all day long, similar to a phone or a real ipad esque experience while running Win8, then TP2 is the best choice bar none.
 
Sounds like your experience with the TP2 is similar to mine with the Samsung Ativ 500T which should be the case as they are both Clover Trail devices with practically the same internals. Overall I've been very happy with the performance though as you noted there can be hitches here and there but that situation has improved substantially with updates.

These devices aren't about top line performance but good enough performance with great battery life and light weight in an x86 device. A lot of PC folks only look at performance benchmarks and don't consider these factors as I guess it's a pretty novel concept to folks that there are x86 PCs as thin and light as the big iPad and these factors are HUGE for a device that's meant to be carried around all day.

There's an interesting article on The Verge today about how Atom Windows 8 devices might kill off Windows RT and I think it's a valid point:http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4...oft-how-atom-processors-could-kill-windows-rt
 
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With enough memory, I found even a dual core Atom 1.66GHz sufficient to run Windows 7 for many tasks.

Current Atoms have pretty weak GPUs, and Win8 performance may not be too great. AT reviewed the Acer W510 Atom/Win8 tablet: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6522/the-clover-trail-atom-z2760-review-acers-w510-tested

I'd certainly like to see cheaper Atom tablets later this year running Silvermont core Atom chips. Performance should be much, much better with 4 cores and 2.7GHz turbo speed on Bay Trail-M platforms, plus finally getting out of order execution. On single threaded apps, the new Atoms are supposedly 50% faster than the current in-order core Atoms. Memory size support is also getting upped to 8GB max. The big negative is that many of those tablets will be using the pathetically slow eMMC controller for solid state storage, even though SATA 2 is supported.
 
heatlesssun said:
Sounds like your experience with the TP2 is similar to mine with the Samsung Ativ 500T which should be the case as they are both Clover Trail devices with practically the same internals. Overall I've been very happy with the performance though as you noted there can be hitches here and there but that situation has improved substantially with updates.

These devices aren't about top line performance but good enough performance with great battery life and light weight in an x86 device. A lot of PC folks only look at performance benchmarks and don't consider these factors as I guess it's a pretty novel concept to folks that there are x86 PCs as thin and light as the big iPad and these factors are HUGE for a device that's meant to be carried around all day.

There's an interesting article on The Verge today about how Atom Windows 8 devices might kill off Windows RT and I think it's a valid point:http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4...oft-how-atom-processors-could-kill-windows-rt
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Yeah in a world where Ativ500 and TP2 exists there is no room for RT tablets. Ipad's on the other had is a different story since they do not do everything but whatever they do, they do it perfect. If you have an ipad that is not more than 2 years old, you will almost always run at blazing speeds, amazing touch response, build quality and battery life. Atom tablets biggest down fall is things on the desktop slow down even if they are doing something similar to an ipad app. for example firefox desktop on an atom tablet is slow compared to safari on an ipad 3 and above. Atom tablets do pick up the pace with some Metro apps, ike IE10 on metro is smooth as butter. but the metro apps are not consistent and most of them are code nightmares. Simple example, One note 2013 is an excellent desktop program but a horrible metro app.
 
Again, I think you're pretty much spot on, it's quite refreshing to see people around here actually look at Windows 8 objectively through the lens of daily use rather than everything being nothing but random criticism that has the facts wrong 50% of the time.

My only caveat to what you said isn't so much that iPad apps are always perfect, just MUCH more consistent, and that's help largely by the fact that for the most part an iPad is an iPad. A Windows 8 device can be something around the performance of an iPad or less to something that utterly blows an iPad away.
 
heatlesssun said:
Again, I think you're pretty much spot on, it's quite refreshing to see people around here actually look at Windows 8 objectively through the lens of daily use rather than everything being nothing but random criticism that has the facts wrong 50% of the time.

My only caveat to what you said isn't so much that iPad apps are always perfect, just MUCH more consistent, and that's help largely by the fact that for the most part an iPad is an iPad. A Windows 8 device can be something around the performance of an iPad or less to something that utterly blows an iPad away.
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Well the reason why I said Ipad apps are perect, I usualy use apps made either by Apple themselves or fairly large copanies with good coding practices. There are many crappy free or 99cent apps out there which are pretty horrible i agree.

My other issue with win8 is that, ok lets say I want to play with the Metro thing, I'll buy it fine, take away my start menu and see if i can get used to this new way of using an operating system, which is copied from Apple who themselves don't use it for their main operating system. The biggest issue is Win8 store sucks. Almost none of the apps that are on my iphone or friends ipad can be found in the windows 8 store, so all I use metro is IE10 and reading the news. For the rest I either need desktop apps or an apple product that can connect to apple's app store.
 
feverlax said:
I use a Ativ Smart PC (500T) and for day to day productivity work it's great. I typically have Chrome with 5-10 tabs open and then either OneNote, Word or PowerPoint depending on what I'm doing with no slow downs what so ever.

Really the limiting factor of the Clover Trail devices is disk I/O. The SSDs that are used with the chipset can be pretty slow. Again, they are fine for day-to-day use but I find if I am copying a large file (movie, VM image, etc) the device can slow down to a crawl.
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It uses eMMC and not an SSD.

This is compared to a Ipad Retina which uses SLC nand chips. (basically an ssd)
 
Andyk5 said:
Well the reason why I said Ipad apps are perect, I usualy use apps made either by Apple themselves or fairly large copanies with good coding practices. There are many crappy free or 99cent apps out there which are pretty horrible i agree.

My other issue with win8 is that, ok lets say I want to play with the Metro thing, I'll buy it fine, take away my start menu and see if i can get used to this new way of using an operating system, which is copied from Apple who themselves don't use it for their main operating system. The biggest issue is Win8 store sucks. Almost none of the apps that are on my iphone or friends ipad can be found in the windows 8 store, so all I use metro is IE10 and reading the news. For the rest I either need desktop apps or an apple product that can connect to apple's app store.
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Metro and how it's implemented in Windows 8/RT is pretty unique. Sure, there are elements that one could say are copied from Apple but there's quite a lot about Metro that is pretty unique, like snapped applications, Live Tiles, etc. And no matter what one may think of Metro's appropriateness with keyboards and mice, it does work with them and iOS has no built-in support for mice.

The Windows Store certainly has a long way to go and there are a lot of top tier apps that need to be done like Instagram. One challenge for Windows 8 apps will be certain companies like Facebook not wanting to move people away from the web site which generates more money for them. However there are a number of 3rd party apps for the major services like Facebook, Instagram, Pandora and some are actually pretty good. It looks like a major revamp of all of Microsoft's 1st party apps, Mail, Music, Video, etc. are soon to get some major face lifts, we'll see.

I would say as it stands right now there are enough apps for the bulk of what people use tablets for like web surfing, eBooks, video and online content. Not a lot of Metro games right now but the catalog is growing and there are some very good ones, one of my favorites is Gravity Guy, pretty addictive twitch touch action game, not bad on a keyboard and mouse desktop either for killing some time.

But love or hate Windows 8, touch and apps are here to stay in Windows and the numbers of Windows 8 and future Windows versions is simply going to go up, even it's that's progression is slow right now. Here's an interesting article from Neowin today, "Evernote, Box executives warn developers not to avoid Windows platforms" :
http://www.neowin.net/news/evernote-box-executives-warn-developers-not-to-avoid-windows-platforms

Maybe this is self-serving but I don't know what interest these guys would have in the success or failure of Windows 8 so I just think they are just saying what they think.
 
heatlesssun said:
But love or hate Windows 8, touch and apps are here to stay in Windows and the numbers of Windows 8 and future Windows versions is simply going to go up, even it's that's progression is slow right now. Here's an interesting article from Neowin today, "Evernote, Box executives warn developers not to avoid Windows platforms" :
http://www.neowin.net/news/evernote-box-executives-warn-developers-not-to-avoid-windows-platforms

Maybe this is self-serving but I don't know what interest these guys would have in the success or failure of Windows 8 so I just think they are just saying what they think.
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I completely agree with heatlesssun's entire post. I already provided input on the Win 8 Atom usability earlier, so I'll further provide an opinion on the topic of Windows 8 adoption instead. :)

I think pundits often overlook the notion that the PC market was saturated to begin with. Hardware has been "so fast" that it has drastically outpaced software; there is no urgency for users to upgrade unless they absolutely need to go buy a new desktop/notebook.

E.g. Average Joe's PC from 2010 running Win 7 is so solid that, until it breaks down, there is no need to buy a new desktop. Heck, my boss is still running Windows XP on his 8lb laptop from 2004!!!

Similarly, enterprises aren't going to invest in drastic re-training and re-tooling of their enterprise software just to adopt to Windows 8 -- especially in its currently unproven and somewhat unpolished stage. Furthermore, firms (e.g. my buddy's IT company) are beginning to transition to an all web-based cloud solution to get their work done. That's a gap where Win 8 doesn't provide the firm with any competitive advantage by upgrading. That's probably one of the largest weaknesses that can be be detrimental to the Windows ecosystem as society moves more towards dependency on cloud.

With portable devices (tablets & phones), it's a different story. Like any "new kid on the block," Microsoft has to penetrate the Android/Apple market. The RT vs Win 8 Phone vs Win 8 Atom vs Win 8 i5 is confusing and fragmented. If Google can knock down Apple's wall over a span of several years, I think Microsoft can do the same with Windows devices. It just needs better focus and more polish (akin to Android in its early days during the Cupcake/Froyo days).
 
On the topics of clouds, none of the software I've had the "pleasure" of using that was cloud-based has been even remotely near the speed, responsiveness, and reliability of the same software's non-cloud version. And data loss - talk about working for 8hrs in a room with 15 other people, saving the teams work to the cloud software, just to realize that the connection had been severed hours ago and the program wipes its temporary files on exit. End rant!
 
pxc said:
On single threaded apps, the new Atoms are supposedly 50% faster than the current in-order core Atoms.
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This would make them roughly equivalent to a Pentium 4 clock for clock in performance, using my incredibly broad rule of thumb estimates.

I have an Atom based Netbook and I found it mostly tolerable for most tasks, Photoshop (v6) included. (Mine's the first gen N270) However the 1.5GB max memory configuration hampered me more than anything else.

Having switched to a Chromebook running ChrUbuntu for my mobile system, I wouldn't bother going back to an Atom. The Sandy Bridge based Celerons do seem to have the best of both worlds: Performance when needed and runs cooler than my old Atom (and northbridge) netbook does. Also, better GPU on die compared to what typically is paired with an Atom... a bit important if you're ever going to end up streaming video.

The big reason for the upgrade was because my Atom Netbook could no longer stream 480p Youtube videos fluidly. The Celery easily does 720 without breaking a sweat.

I know current Atoms are a bit more mature than the first gen chips... but you do sacrifice a bit of performance for power savings.
 
techrat said:
I know current Atoms are a bit more mature than the first gen chips... but you do sacrifice a bit of performance for power savings.
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You definitely give up performance for a Clover Trail Atom but performance is not what Clover Trail is about. It's about an x86 platform that can be used to create tablets that have the same battery life and weight of ARM tablets. Being able to run Office all day on a device that weights 3.2 lbs. with the keyboard dock and about half that without that easily gets 9+ hours on a charge is very cool.

Atoms definitely need to get faster and Core CPUs definitely need to get better battery life and it looks like Intel is trying to solve both issues.
 
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