In part of this question and request from Intel.
First off, we know you don't want to spend time providing driver support of making these GPUs found in the Intel Atom D2700. You guys know as well as I do that the graphic processor technology will run on Windows 8. Windows metro is the same basic metro technology used on the Xbox 360. It runs on the crappiest driver you can possibly have running on a Windows 8 OS which is the Microsoft Basic Display driver. It is very basic and bare bones as you would find on Vista, Windows 7 and so it is on Windows 8.
The intel GMA 3650 is by far above those minimum specifications. Forget b.s. like "Cedar Trail" or "Clover Trail". Those names are just names and meaningless in and of itself. Lets look at the technical hardware. It is all still the same IP architecture platform. The CloverTrail GPU uses the same PowerVX 545 based GPU architecture with maybe a subtle changes but drivers are just sub routines that feeds OS/applications/etc. data and instructions and values to tell a video chip to do a number of functions, display pixels along a raster line and values for changing the resister values which impacts the color of a pixel, frequency, resolution, and many other information. It is the interface between the abstraction layer to the real hardware. It generally consists of three layers, the Direct X/Open GL interface which is the abstraction layer. This only needs to roughly equate to what is down below in the real hardware. The "glue" software logic and the actual code that is part of the driver system that interfaces to actual hardware as mapped. We know without the driver system itself, you don't communicate to components and external hardware.
Intel, what is the issues you guys are facing with actually developing the drivers? How can we help you make the drivers work? Be forthcoming with us on technical information and process of developing a driver and testing as well as quality control and input to make this work. You got the technical documentation on he drivers and the chips up to Windows 7. For crying out loud, Windows 8 is Windows 7 with a new GUI layer in large respect.
The persistent issue isn't display generation or any of the basic stuff that worked with Windows 7 (largely). The issue is with Metro. Any degree of a respectable driver that runs on Windows 8 desktop and Metro that is even reasonable as it would on Windows Vista and 7 should work out.
I heard sort of these excuses about XPDM and WDDM 1.1/1.2. Come on, you just need a driver that is compliant logically and if something isn't really performing up to standard, it just run slow not crash but seriously, it isn't that big a deal. You were dealing with that in Vista with WDDM 1.0.
You got things working with Intel Atom z2760 which is not much in any technical way different than an intel Atom D2700. So what is the hold up? Most of your issues should be cleaned up by making only line by line tweaks to the source before you compile them out between the two chips. In fact, it is just a downgraded version of the D2700 in that the CPU of the z2760 is 32-bit (x86) vs. (x64) and the drivers code end that would be processed by the processor would just need to be recompiled for 64-bit x64 for optimal capability. In addition, it uses the same video architecture.... Intel GMA 3650 which is a PowerVR 545 GPU. So a working driver for the z270 tablet would only be a tweak or two here and there.
What is the issue at hand, Intel?
You don't need the Cedar Trail team per se. You have the people and they are employees of your company and you just have them involved in producing the drivers for Clover Trail and because they are involved in Cedar Trail, they would cover the driver issues on that. Just cut the b.s. and produce the drivers.