Stefan Mileschin

One of the side effects of Intel starting to ship fourth generation Haswell chips for tablets is that it could kill off Windows RT.

If the Haswell spec pans out in the real world, it totally removes the need for Microsoft to try running Windows on ARM. In fact there are some compelling reasons why it shouldn't.

Haswell, Chipzilla's fourth-generation Core i3 processors, use as little as 4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios. This puts it into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, bringing longer battery life to the devices.

This cures the Microsoft Surface Pro which offers good performance but poor battery life which negated the basic use of a tablet. It also means that the Surface RT, which had better battery life, but which needed to run the cut down version of Windows to organise its ARM chip is surplus to requirements.

Windows RT tablets were awful anyway. Asus, Samsung and HP withdrew completely from Windows RT based products. But until Haswell, Microsoft still needed ARM chips to provide something where battery life was longer than five minutes.

Haswell is supposed to have 50 percent better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets. Microsoft would be hard pressed to find an OEM which would want to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore.

Last week Nick Reynolds, the marketing chief for Lenovo in Australia, admitted that low-power Haswell chips have removed the choice between long battery life and high performance for Windows 8 based portable devices.

If Windows RT had come out soon after the tablet craze started, it would have made sense. It would have given Microsoft a way of getting into the mobile market. However, the Vole was late and by the time RT appeared, Intel was not that far from putting Haswell into the shops.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/intels...off-windows-rt