NVIDIA spokesperson says Windows 8 on Kal-El hardware will sport battery life measured in days
Now this one is hard to fathom, but an NVIDIA spokesperson has evidently said that Windows 8 on Kal-El hardware will have us measuring battery life in days, not hours. It's hard to believe because, when introducing the quad-core Kal-El, NVIDIA said battery life will be comparable or better than the Tegra 2 chipset.
Now either he meant its ARM Cortex-A15 Wayne quad-core chipset, or Kal-El, which is still Cortex-A9, will be done with <40nm production method. Alternatively, Windows 8 might turn out very resource-friendly, at least its Metro UI part - it's hard to imagine that if you fire up the desktop IE 10 browser with its Adobe Flash support this won't take a toll on the battery.
In any case, the quad-core Kal-El tablet, that was available as reference hardware at Microsoft's BUILD conference, has been put through its paces running the developers preview of Windows 8 by an NVIDIA VP himself. What we found out very interesting, is that at the end of the video he shows the regular desktop interface, which we are used to see on our Windows 7 rigs.
Intel said that ARM-based devices running Windows 8 won't support legacy Windows software, which is normal, since they are written for x86 machines, but now it seems that we'll be at least capable of running the current default programs and whatever new stuff ships with Windows 8, instead of only seeing the Metro-style interface of Windows 8. You probably still won't be able to fire up desktop Adobe Photoshop on ARM-based devices, but who knows what apps will appear in the Windows Store by the time Kal-El tablets, and others powered by Qualcomm or TI with Win 8 hit the shelves next year.
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