[GTALUG] moving Win8.1 with Bing out of the way

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: James Knott <james.knott at rogers.com>

| Then you may want one of these.  Both Linux & Windows versions are
| available.
| 
| http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/slideshows/how-intels-compute-stick-is-once-again-redefining-the-pc.html?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EWK_NL_WHN_20150409_STR1L1&dni=233806532&rni=22079222

There is a lot of play with formats around Atom and Win8.1 with Bing.
There are lots of Chinese boxes that have beaten Intel to market.

I see the reasons for these developments as:

- Intel wants to defend the space that Arm has been moving into.
  They do this with heavy subsidies of Atom-based SOCs and processors.
  I think that they also do this with creating "reference platforms"
  that take much of the design work out of creating a system.

- Microsoft wants to defend the space that Android has been moving
  into.  Their attempt to run on Arm has been a market disaster.  So
  they too want to ride the Atom at the low end.  They do this by
  making Windows 8.1 free to OEMs in that space.  They also do that
  by engineering a way for Win8.1 to fit into 1G RAM / 16G flash
  systems.

The devil is in the details.  Like
- USB3 -- rare
- 1G ethernet -- rare
- Bluetooth 4.0
- what kind of WiFi
- size of RAM and flash

Few Chinese boxes intentionally support normal Linux distros.  This is
one place where Intel's Compute Stick is ahead.  I hope that the
Windows version (with more resources) can run Linux.

Qualifications to earlier statements:

- Intel has said that it will phase out subsidies.  I forget exactly
  when, but it was supposed to have already started.  I don't
  understand how they haven't been nailed by US DoJ's anti-trust guys.

- "Win8.1 with Bing" is the fig-leaf cheap SKU.  I think that the OEMs
  pay US$10 for Windows and get US$10 back for making Bing the default
  search engine.  Current terms are not publicly known.  The original
  statement from Microsoft had restrictions on tablet screen sizes
  and processor but they changed those restrictions without public
  announcement (as far as I know).

- (my inference) to limit the damage to their cash cow, Intel's cheap
  Atoms for running Windows only have 32-bit UEFI even though the
  processors are 64-bit.  As you know, Linux distros don't support
  this.  Boo.

- to limit damage to their cash cow, Intel's Atoms vary widely in how
  much physical RAM they will support.  I'm sure that this has no
  technical justification.  Most cheap ones only support 2G.  Many of
  the rest stop at 4G.  Some go to 64G and have ECC support!.nnn

- Win8.1 with Bing can fit in 16G of flash.  It does so by using the
  compressed restore image as a virtual disk (roughly speaking).  But
  Windows updates are not compressed.  So as they appear, the 16G has
  less and less space for the user's files.  I infer that Microsoft
  tries to deal with this by only installing "important" updates (the
  user can change this policy -- oops).  I think that this is going to
  end badly.

See how interesting things get when the monopolies feel a threat
coming on?