In an effort to reduce the amount of testing and certification work needed for the new Hondo APU, AMD has apparently decided not to bother with Google’s Android operating system and, at least at launch, the platform will only support Microsoft’s Windows 8.
Steve Belt, AMD’s corporate vice president of ultra-low power products division
reportedly commented on the issue as follows:
"This is a Windows 8 product, only. We're not doing Android on this platform, at least not now.
It is a conscious decision not to go after Android. We think the Windows 8 space has a lot of opportunity, there's plenty of TAM [total addressable market] there for us to go at.
So we don't need to spread ourselves into other markets, we think Windows 8 is a great place to start.
Down the road we may look at Android, right now we're focused on Windows 8."
The company now holds less than 1% of the global tablet market share and that doesn’t include tablets as we know them today, but rather the bulkier TabletPCs.
We reported
here that the tablet market would eventually sell just as many units as the PC market does right now, and it’s easy to understand why both Intel and AMD are hurrying into this sector.
AMD hopes to secure a considerable piece of the market and their initial goal sits between 15% and 20%, but we believe this is a rather modest estimate.
The Hondo APU is quite a mysterious part if it’s supposed to be based on the same Brazos 2.0 platform that we already know, but it will sport much lower power consumption, despite being manufactured in the same 40nm technology.
All reports point to a power consumption level revolving around 4.5 watts and we’re curious to see just what frequency these chips will have and how this will affect their performance.
Unlike Intel that has clearly dropped Linux support for their Clover Trail platform,
AMD is apparently going to offer it later, after the initial Windows 8 wave.
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