It's dead, Jim: "Microsoft Surface RT price drop continues"

I think $90 estimates were too high, but OEMs last year leaking that the license fee was $80 for Windows RT and Office may have been accurate at launch. The licensing fees may have decreased to attract more OEMs as it started to fail.

As part of the 10.8" and under tablet licensing fee slashing the WSJ reported in March, some of the licensing fees are known. Windows 8 + MS Office Home & Student was $120 and is now "as low as $30". I don't see any quotes for what Windows RT + Office will cost, but it's probably in the same ballpark.

Even if ARM loses its efficiency crown and falls behind in performance, it still has many advantages. Price as you noted is one, but also nearly complete customization of the SoC's other devices (@ foundry of choice) is something Intel can't provide.
 
pxc said:
but also nearly complete customization of the SoC's other devices (@ foundry of choice) is something Intel can't provide.
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Customization is really only available to the big players and comes at a price.

Foundry of choice or an Intel Foundry, I would choose Intel, because that is the one you can't choose for ARM and Intel is the foundry King.

Mainly I see it boiling down to cost on the low end on not much more.

I wonder what Happens if Intel really gets far ahead on future Atom, what will Apple do, they are kind of tied to ARM and they could find themselves facing a significant perf/watt disadvantage.
 
Snowdog said:
I wonder what Happens if Intel really gets far ahead on future Atom, what will Apple do, they are kind of tied to ARM and they could find themselves facing a significant perf/watt disadvantage.
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I've been wondering the same thing. If Intel can deliver on its promises with Bay Trail and continue a sustained tick-tock cycle as it has with its Core CPUs and the pricing is right it does open up some interesting scenarios.
 
BladeVenom said:
Have Windows Phone 9 do everything RT can do, and kill RT.
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But then you really have killed RT, just merged it into the phone platform which is probably going to happen anyway and RT and WP8 already have much in common. At any rate, Windows on ARM isn't going away any time soon whatever it is called.
 
Snowdog said:
Customization is really only available to the big players and comes at a price.
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Not talking about the CPU core, but the other components on the SoC. A small manufacturer making a run of 50,000 devices doesn't have enough volume for a customized SoC, but many other manufacturers can have exactly the device they want. The limit is how the cost of the mask set can be spread out to a number of devices.

The bigger point is that there is one Atom SoC, differentiated by power and clock speeds. Only very large orders directly to Intel gets any kind of customization option at all, vs the dozens of different ARMv7 SoCs available to device makers.
 
pxc said:
Not talking about the CPU core, but the other components on the SoC. A small manufacturer making a run of 50,000 devices doesn't have enough volume for a customized SoC, but many other manufacturers can have exactly the device they want. The limit is how the cost of the mask set can be spread out to a number of devices.

The bigger point is that there is one Atom SoC, differentiated by power and clock speeds. Only very large orders directly to Intel gets any kind of customization option at all, vs the dozens of different ARMv7 SoCs available to device makers.
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Who outside of Apple/Samsung is building even custom layout chips into their tablets, let alone instruction set tweaks.

Everyone else just buys what Samsung/NVidia/Qualcomm is selling.
 
Again, I never brought up customized ARM CPU cores, just that other functional blocks can be added to ARM SoCs. Red herring, bro.

Not "everyone" is buying from those 3 companies, but those are definitely represented in top tier manufacturers' consumer products, and represent a small fraction of the overall ARM processor market. There are hundreds of ARM licensees, doing exactly what I posted earlier. I'm not sure why this is so difficult to understand. http://www.arm.com/products/processors/licensees.php

The flexibility available to ARM licensees is something Intel can't match.
 
pxc said:
Again, I never brought up customized ARM CPU cores, just that other functional blocks can be added to ARM SoCs. Red herring, bro.
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Adding functional blocks is a custom layout, brah.

So again, since we are talking about tablets, who outside of Apple/Samsung has added functional blocks to the chips in their tablets, instead of just buying off the shelf parts?
 
Snowdog said:
So again, since we are talking about tablets, who outside of Apple/Samsung has added functional blocks to the chips in their tablets, instead of just buying off the shelf parts?
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Microsoft perhaps? They do have ARM licenses don't they?
 
Snowdog said:
It looks like they just bought Tegra3 from NVidia for Surface RT.
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Microsoft did by an ARM license: http://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/microsoft-licenses-arm-architecture.php. And the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor is going to support RT: http://www.winbeta.org/news/qualcom...ng-snapdragon-800-processor-coming-later-year. It's kind of hard to imagine that Microsoft has no capability configuring ARM processors for RT and would remain willing and unable to do so for the needs of Windows RT.
 
heatlesssun said:
It's kind of hard to imagine that Microsoft has no capability configuring ARM processors for RT and would remain willing and unable to do so for the needs of Windows RT.
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I never said they couldn't, just that it appears that they didn't.

If an off the shelf part suits your needs, it makes sense to use it.
 
No price drops in the UK, the basic model still costs around £400 which 500USD if we remove the VAT. Lame but I doubt they're shifting many units here either. Shouldn't have gone Tegra 3, that chipset was a poor choice for late 2012.
 
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