ARM-based chips power the vast majority of tablets that have hit the streets in the past year or so, but Intel is hoping it’s not too late to get into the tablet space. It will likely be at least another year before Microsoft Windows is capable of running on ARM-based chips, so right now Intel and AMD chips are the best bet for Windows-based tablets, and Intel is hoping its next-generation Intel Atom Oak Trail chipset can compete with ARM-based processors in price, performance, and power consumption.
Intel has been talking up the Oak Trail platform since last year, but now Intel tells the folks at PC Advisor that tablets based on the new chipset should be ready to ship starting in late May or early June. The first Oak Trail chip will be the Intel Atom Z670, a 1.5 GHz x86 processor with support for hyperthreading, 512KB of L2 cache, and a 32-bit memory controller. The chip also features hardware decoding support for HD video.
There’s no word on which device manufacturers will introduce the first Oak Trail tablets, but Fujitsu, Lenovo, Samsung, and other companies have all announced plans to bring Windows 7 devices powered by Oak Trail chips to market.
via Netbook Freaks and Maximum PC