And that's one of the reasons that Microsoft chose to come out with two version of its Surface tablet. The first Surface products will run an RT version of Windows 8 designed for power-efficient ARM chips. Later Surface products will have more powerful Intel Ivy Bridge processors that run the full Windows 8 Pro version.
Intel continues to offer its Atom series of processors that are rated as low as 2 watts, but they haven't been popular as Intel had hoped because of performance issues when running the full desktop versions of Windows.
Intel Haswell to start at 10W TDP
Posted on Monday, December 03 2012 @ 12:39 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck