Also, people are underestimating how much Microsoft and Intel keep doing to break core features of their platforms. They've shipped some truly awful breakage in storage interfaces and power management in recent years: poorly thought-out incompatible changes with little or no public documentation, shipped by OEMs in a state that doesn't even work well enough with Windows to justify all the trouble.
This article is garbage. And how is this Microsoft's fault? The hardware industry has been shitting out incremental weak hardware for years (I'm looking at you Intel)
"Then comes the hardware, you know the part Intel does. It sucks too. Why? Because for the last 5 or so generations it doesn’t actually do anything noticeably better for the user. Sure the CPU performance goes up 10% or so every generation, battery life gets better at a slightly faster pace, and graphics improving extra-linearly but that is irrelevant if you aren’t benchmarking."
In a sane world, this would be a feature, not a bug. PCs are now mature enough that you can buy a decent machine and expect that it will not be hopelessly outdated in two years. This is a good thing.
The problem is that hardware and software manufacturers have a mutually beneficial relationship whereby new software just won't function without that extra 10% hardware capacity you get from a new computer. Even if it's a word processor or a not-terribly-impressive game. (Remember "DirectX 10 requires the power of Vista", which requires a much faster computer that XP?)
And the other problem is that doofuses like the article writer have been so thoroughly gulled by the planned-obsolence treadmill that they actually think that's how it's supposed to be, and throw tantrums if this year's hardware isn't at least 10 times shinier and more sparkly than last year's.
I can read fear and discomfort between the lines of every second post here. This is clearly a game changer and the beginning of the end for Intel. And if Windows manufacturers can’t come up with an alternative soon they will be all in trouble too.
Reminds me of when apple switched to intel hardware and it was believed that you couldn't boot windows. Throw some money after it and people will find a way.
PC sales have also sunk. Maybe Intel should quit the PC business, too. It seems hard to imagine they would do that now, but if 1) Microsoft didn't have such a strangehold on PCs, and 2) if Windows wasn't so dependent on x86, we'd be seeing ARM competition creeping up on low-end Intel chips in notebooks already by now.
Intel is lucky to have a lock-in on PCs thanks mostly to old programs being x86-specific. Hopefully Microsoft can change this with Project Centennial, if it's too late for Windows RT.
Chip manufacturers bent over backwards to make sure their chips ran Windows perfectly. This is obviously changing and they are not investing as much as they used to in compatibility with existing software.
Intel's Skylake processors caused kernel panics on earlier Linux versions, but that never affected Windows, and Microsoft still supports Skylake on 7/8.
And Kaby Lake is just a rebranded Skylake with higher clocks, with no hardware differences. So this is just Microsoft fucking over users.
You may need therapy if it saddens you to see Microsoft port its OS to non-Intel chips, like they used to do with NT. Who else is going drive change away from the x86 ISA?
Well it would be nice if Microsoft found a way to implement them and coordinate with Intel, with backwards compatibility of course (which is the key point of Windows).
Then this brings another question to my mind: if Intel is so contrained by Microsoft's decisions (which make sense) they should have been in a good relationship designing things that work nice together. Why did they design their CPU in a way that would break in Windows usage in the first place?
They must have much more R&D than saying "let's design this hybrid CPU and put a new instruction set on some cores and see if it works on Windows and DRM software else we disable those features" kind of approach.
I'm involved in the open source firmware struggle with Intel for a number of years now. There are Intel customers with solid business cases, but it actually got worse in the last few years.
You're right about that. Intel's product lineup is a huge mishmash of optional features that no one understands and now it's going to bite them. (But not really, because what else are you going to buy? A Ryzen laptop?)
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