AMD "Hondo" APUs May Not Be Too Linux Friendly

I'm 99% certain this is Microsoft trying to ensure that OEMs don't cheapen the Windows 8 brand by reusing hardware designs across their Android and Windows 8 tablets. Not all consumers understand the difference between software and hardware, and if they see the same tablet in a Windows 8 version and a cheaper Android version, a lot of them will chose the Android version without a second thought.

Since the chipsets lack Linux/Android support entirely, reusing the other parts of a tablet design will not be quite as easy as writing a different image to a flash chip. I'm no embedded systems engineer, but I imagine having to completely replace the chipset architecture (let alone the chipset itself) would be a significant deterrent to entirely reusing a Windows 8 tablet's design for an Android one.

Even if Microsoft chose to coerce OEMs into pricing their Android and Windows 8 offerings identically (or, on a cold day in hell, temporarily waive the Windows 8 license fee), competing for consumers with (arguably) superior software alone against an enormous incumbent with an established platform is a fight Microsoft has been on the other side of far too many times to want to start out of the gate.

Alternatively, perhaps Microsoft is subsidizing their OEM tablets, and they don't want savvy customers to buy subsidized Windows 8 tablets and flash their Android "ROMs" of choice onto them.

This sucks for regular Linux users who might like to see either of these chipsets in a new generation of netbooks, but I imagine we aren't too important to AMD and Intel's bottom lines at the moment.

After some thought, what's interesting about this story isn't that some people are making some hardware that will work only in Windows. That happens all the time. What's interesting is that this fact is attracting any sort of attention at all.

So is this how Microsoft is going to fight Linux on the desktop?

What AMD and intel don't seem to realize is that people like me have no qualms moving to platforms that do support linux (Even if we end up using a raspberry pi to do our main computing).

The result is that amd will just alienate some of it's customers and end up with a smaller audience. Well done, AMD.

I think that Microsoft is feeling the heat from Linux/Android, which is why they pushed Intel (& AMD) to go Windows-8 only.

It also is quite likely that that AMD Hondo requires power management features that are not currently available in the kernel/ UEFI bootloader for Linux. Hopefully someone will find a way to support the APU, even if not officially.

So the news is that we don't get fglrx support for Hondo? That doesn't sound nearly as dramatic as "being Windows-only product" etc. Frankly I couldn't care less for fglrx support. If there is demand then it will be reverse engineered, like tons of other hardware has been.

So they force Linux developers to become more clever about interfacing with hardware and pulling whatever they can out of the chips.

I'm sure that'll make Microsoft stronger in the future.