| From: James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> | Then you may want one of these. Both Linux & Windows versions are | available. | | http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/slideshows/how-intels-compute-stick-is-once-again-redefining-the-pc.html?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EWK_NL_WHN_20150409_STR1L1&dni=233806532&rni=22079222 There is a lot of play with formats around Atom and Win8.1 with Bing. There are lots of Chinese boxes that have beaten Intel to market. I see the reasons for these developments as: - Intel wants to defend the space that Arm has been moving into. They do this with heavy subsidies of Atom-based SOCs and processors. I think that they also do this with creating "reference platforms" that take much of the design work out of creating a system. - Microsoft wants to defend the space that Android has been moving into. Their attempt to run on Arm has been a market disaster. So they too want to ride the Atom at the low end. They do this by making Windows 8.1 free to OEMs in that space. They also do that by engineering a way for Win8.1 to fit into 1G RAM / 16G flash systems. The devil is in the details. Like - USB3 -- rare - 1G ethernet -- rare - Bluetooth 4.0 - what kind of WiFi - size of RAM and flash Few Chinese boxes intentionally support normal Linux distros. This is one place where Intel's Compute Stick is ahead. I hope that the Windows version (with more resources) can run Linux. Qualifications to earlier statements: - Intel has said that it will phase out subsidies. I forget exactly when, but it was supposed to have already started. I don't understand how they haven't been nailed by US DoJ's anti-trust guys. - "Win8.1 with Bing" is the fig-leaf cheap SKU. I think that the OEMs pay US$10 for Windows and get US$10 back for making Bing the default search engine. Current terms are not publicly known. The original statement from Microsoft had restrictions on tablet screen sizes and processor but they changed those restrictions without public announcement (as far as I know). - (my inference) to limit the damage to their cash cow, Intel's cheap Atoms for running Windows only have 32-bit UEFI even though the processors are 64-bit. As you know, Linux distros don't support this. Boo. - to limit damage to their cash cow, Intel's Atoms vary widely in how much physical RAM they will support. I'm sure that this has no technical justification. Most cheap ones only support 2G. Many of the rest stop at 4G. Some go to 64G and have ECC support!.nnn - Win8.1 with Bing can fit in 16G of flash. It does so by using the compressed restore image as a virtual disk (roughly speaking). But Windows updates are not compressed. So as they appear, the 16G has less and less space for the user's files. I infer that Microsoft tries to deal with this by only installing "important" updates (the user can change this policy -- oops). I think that this is going to end badly. See how interesting things get when the monopolies feel a threat coming on?