Is it me, or is Oak Trail Prematurely Obsolete?

[sethk]

Somehow I missed this on many of the CES announcements, but it turns out that Oak Trail can't accept more than 2GB of RAM. Now some of you may say that this is the low end, but there were many unique form factors and interesting laptops announced in the last few months and at CES which are going to use Oak Trail. Some cost upwards of $1000. And they can't have more than 2GB RAM!

That just seems like a ridiculous restriction for a Windows 7 device (I will give the android devices a pass for now).. believe me I tried using my very fast laptop with 2GB for a few weeks until the memory upgrade arrived and it's much better with 2GB. And that's with minimal app load. I can't understand why Intel would do this, other than a very cynical money grab, to produce devices that will seem outdated before the year is up. Boo, Intel.

I think Zacate will have a bullet point to add to their Zacate / Bobcat "Fusion" APUs that Oak Trail won't be able to counter - I really hope that Intel addresses this shortcoming this year with an udpated Atom platform.

 

[misan-thrope]

Manufactured obsolesce at its finest!

 

[heatlesssun]

Not really sure how much of an issue this really is. 2 GB is still plenty for Windows 7, most slates running Windows 7 are at 2 GB now since that's the current limit on Atoms anyway with one exception being the Asus EP121 which has a 4 GB option but that's running an i5-470UM.

I think you'd need a faster processor before the memory limit became a big issue.

 

[DanNeely]

I think it's more that the $1000 oaktrail systems are being designed by idiots. Oaktrail is intended to to at least partially replace pinetrail while dropping total system power to continue the attack into nas/router/etc systems currently dominated by arm/mips systems. 2GB is plenty for any of the targeted platforms.