If Intel and friends can pull-off the dual-OS trick in a slick way they’ll have a valuable selling point and a ‘bridge’ between the app-gap in Windows and the consumer richness of Android. Ramos already have a set of Intel-powered Android tablets in China but the Ramos i10 Pro is said to be coming with a dual-OS option on a Baytrail core.
There aren’t enough details available to see how Ramos are going to offer the dual-os option. Will it be dual-boot (not desirable), or Android in a Windows runtime (like Bluestacks), a BIOS-driven instant switch / sleep like Insyde are offering (video below), a dual-CPU option as in the Samsung Transformer Book Trio or virtual machines on a hypervisor. If Intel develop the latter, (and given that they develop i86/i64 Android in-house and own most of the comms and controller hardware now, there’s more possibility than ever before) then they have a very interesting proposition, assuming BayTrail is powerful enough to run it.
The Ramos i10 Pro is likely to be based on the i10 which offers a 1920×1200 10-inch display. The source says, however, that it may ‘wait until next year.’ Keep an eye out for this at CES in Jan.
I’ve seen Android running on Baytrail-T and I’ve even handled a few Ramos devices recently. The potential offering here is an exciting one and something we’ll be tracking closely. Could this be the ultimate 2-in-1 solution?
Whilst dual OS is a neat solution, there is very little benefit compared to VM OS. Virtualizing Android takes very little overhead, small memory usage, and faster transitions.
The Insyde solution seems cool where the background OS is suspended. Syncing data between the OS’s would still seem clunky though like having a separate storage partition. You’d probably need a good amount of RAM too for the suspend state unless they save the state to disk which may require an SSD or one of the faster eMMCs. This may also make using dual CPUs easier.
I normally use VMs to use multiple OS’s but I’m not sure the Bay Trail Atom can handle it well enough to be acceptable for mainstream users. This also would require more RAM than the current 2 GB on current Bay Trail devices otherwise there will be a lot of disk IO slowing things down if you’re running apps both on Windows and Android. Samsung’s demo of their VM and seamless syncing solution looked pretty good but that was on a Core i CPU, a good amount of RAM and SSD.
If you just need to run Android apps and not Android itself then I think providing the runtime environment to run the apps directly would be the best solution as long as there are minimal compatibility issues. I think Bluestacks and Alien Dalvik for the Sailfish OS have the potential to provide the best user experience.
Thanks for the feedback on virtual machines on Baytrail. The insyde solution uses partitioned RAM so yes, I lot would be required.
Here is a bit of interesting news: the current bay trail CPU will not support 64 bit Win8.1 in its current iteration. Some problems associated with power saving while suspend/sleeping wiping out the battery.
The “good news” is that intel will be releasing a bay trail version early next year that will work with win 8.1 64 bit.
Somewhat disturbing. Microsoft/intel seems to have dropped the ball with this one. The press releases don’t make it real clear who’s fault it is.
I guess I will be skipping the first generation bay trail 8.1 tablets, holding out for the update early next year:
http://wind8apps.com/windows-8-1-tablets-intel-bay-trail-64-bit/
Chippy: this seems like a topic that might be worth an article. I just assumed the Dell and others were just being cheap with providing 32 bit home level win8.1, but I guess that isn’t the case.
Uh, no…
Bay Trail is 64bit already, problem is the support isn’t there yet… MS needs to update the Windows 64bit drivers to support connected standby, otherwise it won’t run correctly and would have issues with battery life, among other things.
Bay Trail T (Tablets) will specifically be limited to 4GB max RAM regardless but the LP-DDR3 RAM it uses is the same as the ARM tablets and that market presently doesn’t have many 4GB RAM being produced, thus why they’re still pushing 2GB… even some high end ARM tablets still only get 2-3GB of RAM, but they should start pushing 4GB once the 64bit Windows drivers get pushed out and allows taking advantage of that capacity… along with 64bit Android, etc.
Bay Trail M (Celeron/Pentium branded) will be the models that can support up to 8GB of RAM and can use standard DDR3 RAM, but many will lack Burst Mode (similar to Turbo Boost) and no Quick Sync support like Bay Trail T has…
Main issue to watch out for is that many system makers are also still providing systems with the 32bit UEFI, like they used for Clover Trail, and that really needs to be updated to 64bit UEFI to prevent too many issues with being able to boot an alternative OS, USB, etc… but depending on the system maker they may update the FW later…
This is new. Can you provide a link to where the current Bay Trail chips being used in shipping devices are hardware limited to 32 bit? Intel are listing these part numbers as 64-bit CPUs on their site. Also, some people have already been experimenting 64-bit Linux on Bay Trail T devices.
The current consensus from what I’ve read is that there are only software problems that prevent the use of 64-bit Windows 8 like drivers and UEFI.
Also, I do agree that if you want to use 64-bit OSes, I’d wait for the next round of devices. Most of the current Bay Trail devices only have 2 GB of RAM so even if there are UEFI and driver updates available, it wouldn’t really be worth installing a 64-bit OS.
I’m personally waiting on 4+ GB of RAM devices but I’m not sure which Bay Trail chip (T or M) I’ll be going for. I do want 4 cores and the more RAM for virtualization and file compression. I was hoping for AES-NI but the M chips don’t have that. At least Intel released newer M chips that support turbo last month.
Yes, I agree that Intel shows this as a 64 bit part.
But Win8.1 doesn’t support it as a 64 bit part. On face value, seems a driver issue causing problems with sleep/suspend state resulting in battery drain.
So it seems like it is microsoft’s problem, right?
The real confusing part is the wording at the Intel investor meeting, which intimates that the current part number might not work with 64 bit win8.1 once the driver issues gets straightened out.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/171599-intels-bay-trail-64-bit-next-year
[i]When Intel launched Bay Trail earlier this year, one of the hallmarks of the design was that it would be 64-bit across all SKUs. Then, thanks to problems with the 64-bit driver for Connected Standby mode, Intel shipped the tablet chip on 32-bit Windows 8 tablets…At its Analyst Day last week, Intel finally gave notice that it would be scrapping the 32-bit limit and launching a 64-bit platform for the new 22nm chip [1Q2014]. [/i]
So is intel announcing that Microsoft will be updating their software to work with their existing cpu? Will you be able to install 64 bit win8.1 on existing tablets, and not sacrifice battery life?
This is all just my interpretation of the information I’ve seen which may not be correct due to possible missing information.
I interpret that quote to mean that Intel wasn’t able to release their 64-bit drivers for Windows 8 in time. Specifically, the part that would support Connected Standby. This is similar with the Haswell U and Y series chips. Those chips are capable of supporting Connected Standby at the hardware level but the drivers aren’t available yet. However, Intel and OEMs decided to go the opposite direction as Bay Trail by releasing devices with 64-bit Windows and just not support Connected Standby. Whereas for Bay Trail devices, they decided to support Connected Standby but only install 32-bit Windows 8 where Connected Standby capable drivers are available for Bay Trail. OEMs also prevent users from installing 64-bit Windows 8 by hard coding the UEFI to only boot 32-bit boot loaders.
For both Haswell and Bay Trail, I’m not sure if Microsoft needs to update their Connected Standby code to support 64-bit chips also or Intel just needs to add the driver interface that would allow Windows 8 to detect and use the new S0ix state. There are other hardware component requirements for supporting Connected Standby so existing Haswell U/Y based devices may not support Connected Standby even when 64-bit Windows 8 support becomes available. Since existing Bay Trail devices have functioning Connected Standby, they should work fine and have similar battery life in 64-bit Windows once software support is available.
I’m pretty sure (not 100%) that current Bay Trail chips fully support 64-bit OS’s because people are able to boot 64-bit Linux. Otherwise, 64-bit Linux wouldn’t boot at all. So I believe 64-bit Windows 8 support on Bay Trail is purely a software issue. Although, I can’t say if Intel, Microsoft or both are at fault for the late support.
Of course, it’s possible that Intel really is trying to dance around the topic and the current Bay Trail chips have some sort of hardware flaw that prevents Connected Standby in 64-bit Windows from working and will release new SKUs later. I’m not sure whether or not that’s a good tactic (I’m not a business/financial analyst). We really won’t know until Q1 of 2014 to be sure. Good thing my main requirement of 4+ GB of RAM and Turbo support is making me wait for the next wave anyway. Who knows, maybe Intel will even release new M chips that support AES-NI which I would have use for. Also, I try not to buy things and hope features will be added at a future undetermined time. I screwed myself enough times in the past already.