14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that, while it is largely expected that 2011 will see a veritable battle spark between the x86 and ARM architectures on the IT market, Intel is quite firmly convinced it will have a solid number of design wins.
Intel's Pine Trail platform has already been included in a bunch of tablets whose introduction was made either officially or through leaks.
Still, this platform was initially made for netbooks and has been having a rough time on the slate front because NVIDIA's Tegra 2 ARM-based SoC (system-on-chip) proved quite formidable.
Still, the Santa Clara, California-based CPU giant has been working on the Oak Trail line of products, which is expected to power a new generation of tablets and even smartphones.
Now, the outfit took advantage of the Barclays Capital Global Technology Conference in San Francisco to say what its expectations are for 2011.
Apparently, Intel expects 35 tablets to end up using its technology, them being supposedly already planned for next year.
This will be in addition to the smartphones that will start appearing from major brand vendors in the second half of 2011.
The slates will start being produced and revealed during the first half of the year, from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, ASUS, Acer and others.
Said devices will run one of three operating systems, or two of them should they be dual-boot models, the options being Windows, Android or MeeGo.
Unfortunately, though it was quite excited to make this forecast, Intel didn't say anything on the overall expectations as far as the hardware is concerned.
This is unsurprising, considering that it will fall to the manufacturers themselves to decide what parts to use.
Of course, it can be reasonably safely assumed that the tablets will have touchscreens, WiFi, bluetooth, memory card slots and pretty much every other common feature that the ones so far unveiled decided to integrate.