Intel says its new chips will power dozens of devices that straddle the line between notebooks and tablets. According to the company there are more than 50 different “2-in-1 designs in the pipeline.”

That includes premium models with Intel’s 4th generation Core “Haswell” chips, as well as cheaper, lower-power models with the company’s upcoming Intel Atom “Bay Trail” chips.

Bay Trail 2-in-1 devices could hit the streets for as little as $399.

Asus Transformer Book Trio

That’s not exactly shocking news, since there are a handful of notebook/tablet hybrids with today’s Intel Atom “Clover Trail” chip that already sell for around that price. But most of them launched at much higher prices and only hit the sub-$500 mark after a price drop or two.

So it’s nice to see that Intel is positioning its Bay Trail platform so that tablets using the new processor will be around the same price as models with ARM-based chips.

Intel’s 22nm Bay Trail chips are expected to be 2-3 times faster than the Clover Trail processors that power current Windows 8 tablets. But they consume significantly less power than Intel’s Haswell chips, allowing for thin and light laptops which can get 8 hours of battery life or more — and weeks up standby time.

One of the key advantages Intel Atom chips have over ARM-based processors from Qualcomm, NVIDA, and Samsung is the ability to run Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 (and not just Windows RT). But it’s likely that some of the cheapest Bay Trail-powered tablets will ship with Google Android rather than Windows.

Interestingly, Intel expects tablets with more powerful Haswell chips to get even better battery life than Bay Trail models. The company is promising around 9 hours of battery life for ultrabooks thanks to major improvements in energy efficiency.

via Engadget

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3 replies on “Intel: More than 50 tablet/notebook hybrids coming, some as low as $399”

  1. Will there ever be any Atom-based notebooks or hybrids with larger than 11.6″ screens? I’m asking because there aren’t any currently that I’m aware of, and that seems to be the upper limit for some reason. Is there a rule that Intel will not allow anything larger than 11.6″ to be used with Atom?

    1. ATOM netbooks went up to 12.1″ officially, like the Asus Eee PC 12″ series… Along with the occasional random company most people never heard of releasing something even larger…

      However, present ATOM SoCs are only intended for the mobile market right now but the upcoming Bay Trail will come in three versions…

      Bay Trail T-Will continue being a mobile solution for Tablets, while M and D will be for more PC like products like laptops… Intel will even sell them under the Celeron and Pentium branding instead of calling them ATOMs.

      So, yes, you can expect larger devices when these new models start coming out…

      1. Oh, that’s right. Forgot about those 12″ Netbooks. I was referring to the current crop of ATOM SoC stuff. I’m hoping that whatever they decide to call it, it will have a larger screen and be fanless.

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