32nm Intel Atom Clover Trail Will Power a New Type of Windows Tablet

Since Intel is holding the latest edition of its developer forum, the company is talking about its upcoming CPUs in official capacity, and that includes the Clover Trail.

Unfortunately, even now the IT player is proving to be less than forthcoming on the details, despite the press releases being long.

We aren't quite surprised, not after seeing the same happening with the Haswell. That doesn't mean we aren't a bit disappointed though.

Nevertheless, Intel did mention a few things about the new mobile system-on-chip (SoC), so we'll summarize them here.

Unlike Haswell, Clover Trail won’t use the 22nm process, but the 32nm. The architecture is expected to compensate for the lack of energy efficiency gain associated with more advanced processing nodes.

Both tablets and convertible devices will use it, or so Intel hopes and expects, now that Windows 8 is almost here.

The chip giant also vows that next-generation Windows devices will have improved security, better support for applications, enhanced media and certain new features.

"We believe Windows 8 on Intel architecture will deliver the best experience, performance and compatibility across computing platforms," said David (Dadi) Perlmutter, chief product officer and executive vice president of Intel.

For our part, we think Intel has its work cut out for it, now that some major Atom customers have decided to quit while they're ahead.

We are referring to ASUS and Acer. They reportedly chose to stop making products based on that particular processor lineup. It is the latest and greatest hint that ARM has truly begun to erode Intel's market share on the portable PC front.

At this point, we'll have to wait and see how many of those promised 20 tablets and 140 ultrabooks are still coming out, and if the convertible units that Intel has talked about are included in these numbers or not.