Posts by splod2

Fresh fright of data-spilling Spectre CPU design flaws haunt Intel

D2700

After the last Spectre reveal I invested in the newest fastest hardware available that was immune, the stunning (hmm) Atom D2700. A screaming 2.1GHz dual core Atom with Hyperthreading - but with in-line execution and no speculation/branch prediction/out of order execution - and no management engine.

On its Zotac motherboard with a GT520 taking over from the awful graphics and an SSD with 4GB RAM to perk it up the thing actually runs 64-bit Windows 10 and is surprisingly fine to use - given that you don't try running anything too heavy to think about. It'll stream 1080p video from the web no problem for example.

Would have been interesting to see if anything could have been done with that core given some development resources. Still nice to try and get the most out of some underpowered kit just to see if it was viable.

Lap-slabtop-mobes with Snapdragon Arm CPUs running Windows 10: We had a quick gander

I have native ARM Office running nicely on my Surface 2. Okay it's 2013 Office but the old Tegra 4 actually still copes well with ARM Windows 8 so I'm sure the Snapdragon will walk it. The x86 emulation is almost a negative for security - the older ARM devices find it hard to run x86 viruses making it an unusually secure Windows experience.

Microsoft silently kills dev backdoor that boots Linux on locked-down Windows RT slabs

Actually good

The Surface 2 (non-pro) is actually quite good. If you understand the limitations - that you're not going to get all the apps and no other windows programs work - the tablet is fast and capable. Wierdly the metro interface works well on it (even with a windows 10 style start button now if you want) and you're pretty much immune to viruses and attacks as it isn't x86 and heavily locked down. The Tegra 4 ticks along fine, full office 2013 with Outlook, you can tweak it like normal Windows. The biggest limitiation is IE11 - the metro version feels fine but will no doubt be the first thing to cause issues out of support as newer features become more important. Great camera, well built, good battery, proper USB 3 port and microSD and lovely screen. For a surfing/emailing/office thing it's an anomaly. And it won't get updated to Win10 so there's a bonus.