In my experience, consumers compare hard drive offerings based on storage. They compare tablets and computers based on entry-level price. Entry level, for what a tablet does, doesn't need USB, doesn't need SD, and doesn't need HDMI.

The iPad 2 is over a year old, yes, and its SoC still beats the pants of the Tegra 3. It still has a really good screen, battery life, weight, etc. It doesn't have worse "specs" than Surface in any way that I see except those 16 GB of storage. It doesn't need the latest features of iOS to do what a tablet does, it launched fairly complete.

I would say that people buying the iPad 2 (and not the 3) are price conscious, but saying that they must also be image conscious is a stretch too far. The iPad 2 is a really, really good tablet, there are reasons to buy it beyond image even if its competition (Asus Transformer Prime) is also really good.

If someone is in the market for a tablet that can:

• Browse the web.
• Read and send email.
• Synchronize with Exchange.
• Open and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.
• Play movies.
• Read ebooks.

then the iPad 2 with iWork does it well at $430. I guess we'll find out if consumers think that the Surface does it so much better that it can command a price premium.

So, you're looking at the MS Surface ($500) and the iPad 3 ($500) and declaring that the Surface is $100 cheaper because it has 16 GB more storage? The "equivalent" iPad is the iPad 2, with iWork, for $430.

If what you want is a good, unlocked Linux phone, get a Galaxy Nexus. It's $349.00, it's unlocked, it runs Linux (wrapped in Android but allowing you to build your own kernels), and it's actually a good phone. If you're not in the US market, and you don't want the N9, consider the Razr i, which also has an unlocked boot loader. Me? I'm happy with my iPhone 4S, I'll just keep iOS 5, thank you very much ;-)

Bill Gates learned to program on a computer he didn't own though a terminal and look how damaged he is, from that terrible experience. Or not. The point of Raspberry Pi is not to teach children how to build computers, the point is to teach them how to use computers and development scripts, software, and websites, while giving them access to the educational and social benefits of the Internet, inexpensively. Using a binary blob doesn't diminish that.

The iPhone5 ships with an adapter in the EU: iPhone 5 Scorns Standards Promise To European Commission.

Thanks for posting the specs, but I think that the base 16 GB version of the iPad with iWork (Office replacement) at $530 is a comparison that people are more likely to make. iPad may also win on battery, 4G comms, and definitely wins on ecosystem. It will probably win a comparison of productivity apps, the videos I've seen of people using Excel on Windows tablets do not look encouraging, whereas Apple has had more than two years to refine their iWork suite. The iPad also has cheaper keyboard options available, if that what's people are looking for.

Update: Looking at David Kanter's site (graph 1 and graph 2) the AMD parts and Intel server parts come in at about the efficiency listed in the chart (which again is based on peak performance and published TDP). NVIDIA's Kepler and Intel's Silverthorne seem to be more efficient in the real world than as presented from that calculation. I have no idea about the Cortex A9, there are a million different versions and I can't recall seeing hard numbers for the one in the iPad 2, some of which are on a 40 nm process and some of which are on a 32 nm process, further muddying the waters. Either way, it's cool research.

Yeah, the presentation says TDP so they didn't measure consumption. I guess Jack and Piotr didn't feel like cracking their iPad open and probing it with a voltmeter. Phoronix may have meant "counting only the chip" and made a syntactic error.

D'oh! I replied to the wrong comment. Anyway, I hope we get to talk more about architecture some time.

Yes, yes, and yes. ARM designs good CPU cores and does so inexpensively, no doubt about it. At the risk of sounding contrary, the real race isn't between Intel's budget and ARM's: it's between Intel on one side and ARM, Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, and more (AMD is my favorite dark horse) on the other. Apple alone has bought multiple chip design companies, and probably a whole company's worth of engineers from the formerly-ATi side of AMD. I think that's why their phones cream their competitors (or all ISA flavors) in the aforementioned examples.

It's true, ARM will continue to increase it's R&D investment now (which is really their whole budget), but that investment will increase more slowly for awhile, the company is trimming its hiring plans for the rest of 2012 amid concerns about a potential sales slowdown in the second half. (Intel is trimming, too, it's more macro economic than anything else.) But I maintain that ARM Holdings vs. Intel is only a small part of ARM vs. Intel ;-)

It has taken Intel an enormous effort to get as far as it has in the mobile space, which isn't very far (yet). I have no idea what Intel is making on mobile CPUs, but it's not selling many of them at this point. It's going to keep trying, though. Intel knows that ARM is now where Intel was when Intel beat up IBM and took IBM's lunch money, so they're not going to stop. I think it's going to stay interesting.

I hope we get to talk more about architecture some time.

That's a good point. ISA goes beyond instructions and also defines the memory and interrupt models, which Atom must then emulate as well. I'm not an expert on the interrupt models, but if I recall correctly, ARM's can be implement more easily and with less power, so Atom loses there. But, to my knowledge, it's still not a large difference.

You're right that iPhone 4S creams Medfield reference in battery performance benchmarks, I'm looking at the ones on AnandTech right now. But the iPhone 4S creams other Android smartphones, too, so it's not just the ISA. Many of the android phones compared in the XOLO review (and the newer ones, too) do about as well as the Medfield reference design in the normalized power charts. AnandTech doesn't include all of the phones in the review in the later link, so you have to tab back and forth. I'm not going to demand that you call the Atom stellar, but its deficiencies are (I think) removed from the ISA and CISC vs. RISC at large.

Thanks for replying, I should have been more specific. Your conclusion that (I'll paraphrase) no one should care that Intel's Clover Trail SoC is shipping with Windows 8 only (and documentation may be closed) is correct. But parts of your arguments fall down, even though other parts hold up. Your statement about RISC vs. CISC at the core level is correct, but at the ISA level is wrong. You're absolutely right that RISC vs. CISC was settled 20 years ago, with CISC vendors adopting RISC cores wrapped in CISC decoders, but you're wrong about the penalty associated with that decoder. Your statement

is wrong in the general case, at least when you look at an SoC or even core level. Some ARM-based SoCs are more efficient than Medfield, but none are several times more efficient. Your comments in this thread about Intel having a 4-to-1 size advantage with its transistors are also wrong, Medfield and Clover Trail are both on 32 nm, both launched (or are launching) after Qualcomm's high-end stuff on TSMC 28 nm, and Samsung's high-end stuff on their own 32 nm process. If Atom were on 22 nm FinFETs and losing to TSMC 40 nm, that would be embarrassing but that's not the case. Atom core has its own shortcomings but they're not really ISA-related.

Bruce, if you understand this stuff so well, why is your article so wrong about RISC vs CISC? And why are your comments about Atom vs modern ARM SoCs so far removed from real power and efficiency measurements? And are you aware that many Android phones (not just the Medfield ones) use PowerVR graphics?

My interview for the mobile Safari browser team was an all-day interview. My advice to anyone about to go for that kind of interview is to eat well beforehand and bring your own food, too. Even though I'd already eaten as "insurance" (I was told that the interview would start with breakfast) I was failing really simple problems by 2:00 PM, even one's that I'd answered in front of classrooms. Maybe they wanted the candidate who would demand food but I was unemployed at the time and didn't feel comfortable demanding anything. I wound up working on a similar team at a different company.

It was a joke, because, you know, enthusiasts and people who read tech news have become very wary of buying things from Sony (I know I have, except for my TV, and my PS3 (which I suspect is starting to die after 2.5 years of ownership and the Linux option being removed)).