It will need to be upped to 128GB minimum though for Win 10. And a 256GB option might be a good idea. A SD card could help but I'm a bit sceptical about the performance. Hell, even the eMMC might turn out to be inadequate in that regard.
There's also no mention of RAM in the specs, I'm worried that they make do with something as low as 2GB on android but will need to bump that up for Win 10.
All in all, I think it's still unrealistic to expect to have any real OS and apps running or any real work done on a 350g device. The potential for 700-800g devices is good though.
The main issue is that the Atom X5 and X7 lack both SATA controllers and up-to-date eMMC controllers - they only support eMMC 4.51. Which, sadly, leaves it with gimped storage. Sure, you could bump it up to a decent size, but performance would still be awful. The only solutions possible with tech available today would be either adding a PCIe SATA controller + m.2/mSATA SSD, which adds cost, power draw and board complexity, or adding a PCIe SSD, which would be expensive enough to kill the product outright. A ~$500 tablet with a ~$200 SSD? Not going to happen.
In other words, the W10 version of this will sadly not arrive until either a) the price of PCIe SSDs drop significantly (when DRAM-less options become available?) b) the next generation of Atom x7 adds a more up-to-date storage controller (eMMC 5.x? UFS?)
128GB emmc 4.5.1 will be good enough and an upgrade for most people who are still on 5400rpm HDD, can add fast microSD too, 2GB more ram can be added and the total BOM for these two additions should not exceed $50, Acer can factor-in good profit margin and still price this tablet at $375-400.
Given the abysmal flash performance of nearly all eMMC based tablets out there, I beg to differ. Sure, it'll be usable. But it wouldn't be _good_. Which is what a niche product like this desperately needs to be.
I must've only used the good ones, 'cause the eMMC I benchmarked on Cloverview and Bay Trail tablets merely had similar sequential R/W performance to middling HDDs- but were 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than spinning rust for the random reads/writes that matter for general performance. Sure, it's way way slower than SATA, but still much faster than the magnetic disks that are *still* included in even some high-end systems.
@Valantar :Just check out the performance of old Intel Baytrail tablets of last year, the emmc 4.5.1 parts used are definitely better than 5400 rpm HDD which still used by majority of population and still shipped in majority of 2015 products.
I run windows 10 on a 32gb tablet with 1gb of ram and it runs quite well. Its about 3 years old.
You seem a little ignorant with comments like "It will need to be upped to 128GB minimum though for Win 10" when that is obviously false. Windows 10 takes up very little space, less than 10gb on my tablet.
Also why the hell would you need 4 gb of ram? 2 is more than adequate for a tablet designed for media consumption.
Also my 1gb of memory atom tablet from 3 years ago runs photoshop fine in a pinch. Even with a Wacom attached, it is smooth enough for sketching.
Not every device 'needs' to be a top of the line powerhouse with unnecessary memory and hdd space. I can even compile and run large projects just fine on the tiny 7" tablet.
No it's not. Windows gives you real file management, good built in media players, and good third party players. Even stuff like VLC that's awesome on Windows is terrible on Android. Oh, and Windows has support for SD cards too without hacks. There's no universe where Android makes more sense for media, much less games. Android's time has come and gone on tablets, so it's bizarre to see a company advertise a "gaming" tablet and then see it's running Android LOL.
I'm super disappointed we couldn't get Nvidia's Denver cores running x86 Windows though, as I'm sure they originally planned. I'm not sure how the CPU performance was (although it beat all ARM stuff save for Apple), but the GPU performance would be better than 3rd gen Atom, I think...second gen with its 4 cores for sure.
What are you talking about? I have a Surface 3 with Win10. It has a 64gb SSD and 2gb RAM. Same Processor, well an Atom I7 anyway. Runs fast and I would say flawlessly. This tablet is running identical specs down to the screen resolution of a Surface 3. Only difference, and the reason it wouldn't work at all: the 8 inch screen size. You couldn't do anything at that resolution and size.
Ditto, I read "gaming tablet", I look at the specs and am thinking "okay, so probably Intel's best Atom, that may be cool", and then I read "Android" and it's like whaaaaaaaat?
What's hilarious about running Android on it too is Android runs slower than Windows, despite one being an awesome full PC OS and the other being a crippled thing for phones.
Given that intensive android games often have a native arm binaries to increase performance who in their right mind would buy an x86 to run android games? Also note that acer seems rather quiet about the GPU specifications. Why get this instead of last year's nvidia shield?
The X7 Cherry Trail Atom uses the same GPU core as Broadwell chips, except with 12EU instead of 20+. Performance should be similar to Sandy Bridge-era Intel HD 3000 graphics- not stellar compared to Nvidia, but plenty good for the kind of games people tend to play on small-screen tablets.
I agree about x86 vs ARM for Android though. Seems like a strange decision.
I thought what you said is nonsense but realized it was brilliant for Intel's cause. They made this kind of mistake before by reserving their latest process nodes for desktop/server CPUs and only decided to include Atoms recently. Since their graphics is often inferior versus other SoCs, you are correct that they should include the L4 cache to Atoms.
I'm genuinely curious how the graphics on Cherry Trail actually compares to other current SOCs with similar power envelopes (haven't seen benchmarks myself).
Atom graphics have come a long way in the past 3 generations, from 2013's Cloverview using an outdated PowerVR core (the same one used in iPhone 4), to Bay Trail having an actual Intel GPU core (even if it was massively cut-down), to Cherry Trail getting the same GPU performance as Intel's 35-95W chips had in 2011- Today's Atom chips should have roughly the same iGPU performance as something like the i7 2700K, and I think that's pretty neat.
Sorry. Got off the rails there. Yeah, curious to see benchmarks. I've been out of the loop on mobile ARM SOCs for awhile and I'm sure they're getting much-improved GPU cores as well.
Atoms actually aren't built on the same process as Intel's core CPUs; even when they're on the same node. Core uses a high performance process, Atom one tuned for higher power efficiency. What's changed recently is that Intel's been spending a lot of money to compress the development rate for the low power process to get it launching at the same time as the high performance one. The HP process historically lead because it was higher margin; so it made sense to do all of the initial R&D on it and let the LP one follow behind after all the initial tech challenges had been worked out.
Same GPU core as Broadwell; but at lower power levels/clocks so they probably won't perform as fast. The x7 has 16 cores in its GPU (the x5 is the one with only 12); but they run at 200-600 MHz vs Sandybridge doing 350-800+ even in the 17W variants.
If they were to announce a less gaudy tablet with the same hardware inside, I'd definitely be interested. My 2013 Nexus 7 is still plenty fast enough with some tweaks but starting to disintegrate and needs a new battery. My Venue 11 Pro (which spends much of its life running Android anyway) is too big and heavy for casual use.
But that is fugly! There's a good reason most tablets are boring black rectangles...
I'm going to show my ignorance here, but how are they running Android on x86? The last I heard, the only implementation of Android on x86 was the unofficial android-x86.org project. Are they really using a community made port?
Android on x86 has been around for a few years now. The first phone I remember running on x86 (non android-x86.org) was the Orange San Diego circa Q3 2012. I personally have a Memo pad 7 from Asus that is well over a year old and it runs android 5.0 just fine.
8 inches is too small to do "real work". "Ooh, look, my spreadsheet cells are .25 inches each !" Too bad you can't see all the windows "stuff" I just did. /common sense
Lots of folks are wondering if this tablet has the GPU chops. Anand's review of the X7 in the Surface 3 shows it's far behind the Tegra K1, with somewhere between 50-75% of the performance. And that's in a more relaxed thermal environment: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9219/the-surface-3-r...
I'm not seeing a benefit over the Shield Tablet pretty much anywhere. It performs worse than a tablet release 14 months ago and costs $100 more. And Nvidia's build-in Direct Stylus 2, low-latency WiFi-direct controller, Grid, game streaming, and exclusive titles all seem to tilt the balance in the Shield favor. On top of that, the Shield is a good looking tablet. The predator is, um, fugly?
If Nvidia releases an X1 update on the Shield tablet (Please Nvidia, I've been waiting!), this looks even worse.
WHY are people saying this needs to come with Windows?!?
It's a gaming tablet. For Android games. Android games are usually ports of iOS games made to run on weaker SOCs, which is why an Atom SOC with its weak graphics sorta makes sense here.
But on Windows?!? Can you suggest any Windows games besides Solitaire, that you'd like to run on an Atom CPU with a cut down Intel GPU?!?
I play Civ5 at medium setting on my Surface 3. I'd guess that about 20 of the games in my library would run on it at some capacity. I also play Test Drive Unlimited 2 with a Xbox 360 Controller, same for Grid:Autosport. I could write about all of them, but the Three games I just mentioned are better versions of genre than any android version.
Fun Fact: I've been playing Dark Souls again, since I was inspired by my own comment to find out what else would work. I use a PS4 controller via Bluetooth with DS4Tool. I tried using DSfix and found that because it changes the game solely for the point of running at more clarity, it makes it unplayable. However, in it's vanilla form, it runs smooth and is just as good visually as the PS3 version. Android for gaming? Never again. Maybe I'll try DS2 when I get a surface 4.
Why would anyone get an Android tablet for gaming?!?
Thanks to piracy as well as platform fragmentation, all the good games are either iOS exclusives, or come out on iOS first, with a weak Android port out later.
The whole concept doesn't make sense. (Nvidias tablet excluded though)
Most of the really big games it does not matter if they come out on IOS or Android first as when they get updated they start to sync updates to both platforms. The model that works best on tablet games I free to play that solves most of the piracy issues.
And Android is the best tablet platform for Emulators.
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KateH - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
8" Tablet with 1200P wide-gamut IPS panel, Atom X7 AND passive stylus support? Can we get a Windows 10 version of this please!BMNify - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
This needs to come with Windows 10.Visual - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
It will need to be upped to 128GB minimum though for Win 10. And a 256GB option might be a good idea. A SD card could help but I'm a bit sceptical about the performance. Hell, even the eMMC might turn out to be inadequate in that regard.There's also no mention of RAM in the specs, I'm worried that they make do with something as low as 2GB on android but will need to bump that up for Win 10.
All in all, I think it's still unrealistic to expect to have any real OS and apps running or any real work done on a 350g device. The potential for 700-800g devices is good though.
Valantar - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
The main issue is that the Atom X5 and X7 lack both SATA controllers and up-to-date eMMC controllers - they only support eMMC 4.51. Which, sadly, leaves it with gimped storage. Sure, you could bump it up to a decent size, but performance would still be awful. The only solutions possible with tech available today would be either adding a PCIe SATA controller + m.2/mSATA SSD, which adds cost, power draw and board complexity, or adding a PCIe SSD, which would be expensive enough to kill the product outright. A ~$500 tablet with a ~$200 SSD? Not going to happen.In other words, the W10 version of this will sadly not arrive until either
a) the price of PCIe SSDs drop significantly (when DRAM-less options become available?)
b) the next generation of Atom x7 adds a more up-to-date storage controller (eMMC 5.x? UFS?)
BMNify - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
128GB emmc 4.5.1 will be good enough and an upgrade for most people who are still on 5400rpm HDD, can add fast microSD too, 2GB more ram can be added and the total BOM for these two additions should not exceed $50, Acer can factor-in good profit margin and still price this tablet at $375-400.Valantar - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Given the abysmal flash performance of nearly all eMMC based tablets out there, I beg to differ. Sure, it'll be usable. But it wouldn't be _good_. Which is what a niche product like this desperately needs to be.KateH - Saturday, September 5, 2015 - link
I must've only used the good ones, 'cause the eMMC I benchmarked on Cloverview and Bay Trail tablets merely had similar sequential R/W performance to middling HDDs- but were 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than spinning rust for the random reads/writes that matter for general performance. Sure, it's way way slower than SATA, but still much faster than the magnetic disks that are *still* included in even some high-end systems.BMNify - Saturday, September 5, 2015 - link
@Valantar :Just check out the performance of old Intel Baytrail tablets of last year, the emmc 4.5.1 parts used are definitely better than 5400 rpm HDD which still used by majority of population and still shipped in majority of 2015 products.danthekilla - Sunday, September 6, 2015 - link
I run windows 10 on a 32gb tablet with 1gb of ram and it runs quite well. Its about 3 years old.You seem a little ignorant with comments like "It will need to be upped to 128GB minimum though for Win 10" when that is obviously false. Windows 10 takes up very little space, less than 10gb on my tablet.
Also why the hell would you need 4 gb of ram? 2 is more than adequate for a tablet designed for media consumption.
Also my 1gb of memory atom tablet from 3 years ago runs photoshop fine in a pinch. Even with a Wacom attached, it is smooth enough for sketching.
Not every device 'needs' to be a top of the line powerhouse with unnecessary memory and hdd space. I can even compile and run large projects just fine on the tiny 7" tablet.
Idiots like you annoy me.
pSupaNova - Sunday, September 6, 2015 - link
No he's correct if you put a Desktop OS on it then you better have good storage/RAM options.And if you need it just for Media consumption then Android is a much better OS to have on a tablet of this size.
Wolfpup - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
No it's not. Windows gives you real file management, good built in media players, and good third party players. Even stuff like VLC that's awesome on Windows is terrible on Android. Oh, and Windows has support for SD cards too without hacks. There's no universe where Android makes more sense for media, much less games. Android's time has come and gone on tablets, so it's bizarre to see a company advertise a "gaming" tablet and then see it's running Android LOL.I'm super disappointed we couldn't get Nvidia's Denver cores running x86 Windows though, as I'm sure they originally planned. I'm not sure how the CPU performance was (although it beat all ARM stuff save for Apple), but the GPU performance would be better than 3rd gen Atom, I think...second gen with its 4 cores for sure.
WhisperingEye - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
What are you talking about? I have a Surface 3 with Win10. It has a 64gb SSD and 2gb RAM. Same Processor, well an Atom I7 anyway. Runs fast and I would say flawlessly. This tablet is running identical specs down to the screen resolution of a Surface 3. Only difference, and the reason it wouldn't work at all: the 8 inch screen size. You couldn't do anything at that resolution and size.Wolfpup - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Ditto, I read "gaming tablet", I look at the specs and am thinking "okay, so probably Intel's best Atom, that may be cool", and then I read "Android" and it's like whaaaaaaaat?What's hilarious about running Android on it too is Android runs slower than Windows, despite one being an awesome full PC OS and the other being a crippled thing for phones.
spikebike - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Given that intensive android games often have a native arm binaries to increase performance who in their right mind would buy an x86 to run android games? Also note that acer seems rather quiet about the GPU specifications. Why get this instead of last year's nvidia shield?anandreader106 - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
I can think of 100 reasons off the top of my head.WorldWithoutMadness - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Would you kindly mention 25 of them?I'm pretty curious whether that number is not a figure of speech or not
ToTTenTranz - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
1 - Windows 102 - iPega 9023
3 - Steam In-Home Streaming
4 - 100: best 97 games on Steam playable with a gamepad
Valantar - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
You did see that this is an Android tablet, right?smorebuds - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
failWhisperingEye - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
ToTTenTranz- What article did you just read?anandreader106 - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
@WorldWithoutMadness I was simply referring to the difference in retail between both tablets.KateH - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
The X7 Cherry Trail Atom uses the same GPU core as Broadwell chips, except with 12EU instead of 20+. Performance should be similar to Sandy Bridge-era Intel HD 3000 graphics- not stellar compared to Nvidia, but plenty good for the kind of games people tend to play on small-screen tablets.I agree about x86 vs ARM for Android though. Seems like a strange decision.
dj_aris - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Atom x7 should come in L4 eDRAM flavor as well. That would be a real killer in games.zodiacfml - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
I thought what you said is nonsense but realized it was brilliant for Intel's cause. They made this kind of mistake before by reserving their latest process nodes for desktop/server CPUs and only decided to include Atoms recently. Since their graphics is often inferior versus other SoCs, you are correct that they should include the L4 cache to Atoms.KateH - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
I'm genuinely curious how the graphics on Cherry Trail actually compares to other current SOCs with similar power envelopes (haven't seen benchmarks myself).Atom graphics have come a long way in the past 3 generations, from 2013's Cloverview using an outdated PowerVR core (the same one used in iPhone 4), to Bay Trail having an actual Intel GPU core (even if it was massively cut-down), to Cherry Trail getting the same GPU performance as Intel's 35-95W chips had in 2011- Today's Atom chips should have roughly the same iGPU performance as something like the i7 2700K, and I think that's pretty neat.
Sorry. Got off the rails there. Yeah, curious to see benchmarks. I've been out of the loop on mobile ARM SOCs for awhile and I'm sure they're getting much-improved GPU cores as well.
DanNeely - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Atoms actually aren't built on the same process as Intel's core CPUs; even when they're on the same node. Core uses a high performance process, Atom one tuned for higher power efficiency. What's changed recently is that Intel's been spending a lot of money to compress the development rate for the low power process to get it launching at the same time as the high performance one. The HP process historically lead because it was higher margin; so it made sense to do all of the initial R&D on it and let the LP one follow behind after all the initial tech challenges had been worked out.DanNeely - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Same GPU core as Broadwell; but at lower power levels/clocks so they probably won't perform as fast. The x7 has 16 cores in its GPU (the x5 is the one with only 12); but they run at 200-600 MHz vs Sandybridge doing 350-800+ even in the 17W variants.Pessimism - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Agreed, since Intel's answer to this (libhoudini) seems to be dead and abandoned...Azurael - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
If they were to announce a less gaudy tablet with the same hardware inside, I'd definitely be interested. My 2013 Nexus 7 is still plenty fast enough with some tweaks but starting to disintegrate and needs a new battery. My Venue 11 Pro (which spends much of its life running Android anyway) is too big and heavy for casual use.But that is fugly! There's a good reason most tablets are boring black rectangles...
damianrobertjones - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
This REALLY does need to come with Windows 10!WhisperingEye - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
Surface 3? Same specs, Windows 10. Two inches larger. $200 more.GreyFox7 - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
To me it would have been more interesting with a Tegra X1 SoC.Mr Perfect - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
I'm going to show my ignorance here, but how are they running Android on x86? The last I heard, the only implementation of Android on x86 was the unofficial android-x86.org project. Are they really using a community made port?shades - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Android on x86 has been around for a few years now. The first phone I remember running on x86 (non android-x86.org) was the Orange San Diego circa Q3 2012. I personally have a Memo pad 7 from Asus that is well over a year old and it runs android 5.0 just fine.royalcrown - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
IMO, it DOESEN'T need windows 10 at all because:8 inches is too small to do "real work". "Ooh, look, my spreadsheet cells are .25 inches each !" Too bad you can't see all the windows "stuff" I just did. /common sense
deppman - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Lots of folks are wondering if this tablet has the GPU chops. Anand's review of the X7 in the Surface 3 shows it's far behind the Tegra K1, with somewhere between 50-75% of the performance. And that's in a more relaxed thermal environment: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9219/the-surface-3-r...I'm not seeing a benefit over the Shield Tablet pretty much anywhere. It performs worse than a tablet release 14 months ago and costs $100 more. And Nvidia's build-in Direct Stylus 2, low-latency WiFi-direct controller, Grid, game streaming, and exclusive titles all seem to tilt the balance in the Shield favor. On top of that, the Shield is a good looking tablet. The predator is, um, fugly?
If Nvidia releases an X1 update on the Shield tablet (Please Nvidia, I've been waiting!), this looks even worse.
V900 - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
WHY are people saying this needs to come with Windows?!?It's a gaming tablet. For Android games. Android games are usually ports of iOS games made to run on weaker SOCs, which is why an Atom SOC with its weak graphics sorta makes sense here.
But on Windows?!? Can you suggest any Windows games besides Solitaire, that you'd like to run on an Atom CPU with a cut down Intel GPU?!?
THINK before you post people!
WhisperingEye - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
I play Civ5 at medium setting on my Surface 3. I'd guess that about 20 of the games in my library would run on it at some capacity. I also play Test Drive Unlimited 2 with a Xbox 360 Controller, same for Grid:Autosport. I could write about all of them, but the Three games I just mentioned are better versions of genre than any android version.WhisperingEye - Thursday, September 17, 2015 - link
Fun Fact: I've been playing Dark Souls again, since I was inspired by my own comment to find out what else would work. I use a PS4 controller via Bluetooth with DS4Tool. I tried using DSfix and found that because it changes the game solely for the point of running at more clarity, it makes it unplayable. However, in it's vanilla form, it runs smooth and is just as good visually as the PS3 version. Android for gaming? Never again. Maybe I'll try DS2 when I get a surface 4.V900 - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Why would anyone get an Android tablet for gaming?!?Thanks to piracy as well as platform fragmentation, all the good games are either iOS exclusives, or come out on iOS first, with a weak Android port out later.
The whole concept doesn't make sense. (Nvidias tablet excluded though)
pSupaNova - Sunday, September 6, 2015 - link
Most of the really big games it does not matter if they come out on IOS or Android first as when they get updated they start to sync updates to both platforms. The model that works best on tablet games I free to play that solves most of the piracy issues.And Android is the best tablet platform for Emulators.