[MBCook]

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.

[Mythbusters]

and the updated office runs on it beautifully. So what is your point again?

[gman99]

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