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by smegel 4977 days ago
> The fact that you have an ability to run a program like office on a tablet class hardware

This is an extremely misleading statement. "Tablet class hardware" today is vastly more powerful than PC's several years ago which were quite happily running the Office of their day.

Furthermore, there is plenty of Office-like equivalents happily running on Android and iOS tablets today so the suggestion that "Office on a tablet" is some kind of revolution seems to lack substance.
1 comments
Mythbusters 4977 days ago
I was referring to ARM as the architecture. Should have been clearer
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smegel 4977 days ago
Sorry, but I still dont understand your point. Dual/Quad-core ARM chips of today running at 1.5Ghz blow away x86 based PC's from several years ago (I don't know exactly at what point) that ran Office XP quite happily.

To give you an idea, the system requirements of Office XP was "a Pentium processor with a clock speed of at least 133 megahertz (MHz)".

Besides, tablets are doing amazing things today, are we really saying an Office suite represents the pinnacle of computing power?

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Mythbusters 4977 days ago
In case you are not trolling, time to educate yourself with the difference between these two architectures: http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/107133....

Surprise, if you copy an old mac app on your iPhone it won't run!

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smegel 4977 days ago
No, please, why don't you educate us all as to the deficiencies in ARM over x86 that make porting an x86 application to ARM some incredible achievement?
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MBCook 4977 days ago
You seem to believe that ARM performs quite poorly compared to x86 (assuming similar clock speeds). Could you explain why?

It seems like if something could run on a ~166 MHz Pentium, it shouldn't be a surprise that a Tegra 3 (probably 1.5 Ghz or more) can run something similar. And older versions of Office ran on much less.

Even then, Apple put Pages on the iPad 3 years ago, so that should prove word processor like software could run acceptably on an ARM. The Surface is clearly much more powerful than an iPad 1.

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Mythbusters 4977 days ago
and the updated office runs on it beautifully. So what is your point again?
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gman99 4977 days ago
He was just responding to your comment:

> The fact that you have an ability to run a program like office on a tablet class hardware

Well, current ARM platforms vastly outstrip the performance requirements of, say, OfficeXP so "tablet class hardware" means nothing.

So the question is why do you find it impressive that MS got Office working on SurfacePro? In fact, it would be surprising if they couldn't. Sure, if they were emulating x86 code on ARM then it would truly be impressive for it to perform as well as it does. But this should be a straightforward port.

In fact, here's Win95 running on an N900 (5 year old ARM hardware emulating an x86) http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42195

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