14 DAY TRIAL // On the tablet front, Intel has yet to impress anyone, but a true impact may finally be made in the third quarter of 2012, provided Acer and Lenovo are really doing what reports say.
The rumor mill has been wrong before, but the one Digitimes has just started about Acer and Lenovo may be on to something.
According to the news and rumor site, the two companies are both designing Intel Clover Trail tablets running the Windows 8 operating system.
Windows 8, as people know by now, is the first iteration of the Windows operating system during whose development Microsoft paid close attention to needs of the tablet market.
The tablets being put together in the labs of Lenovo and Acer will arrive in the third quarter of 2012 (July-September).
It is assumed that they will be more popular on the enterprise sector than the consumer market.
Businessmen and professionals will benefit from the support for many legacy applications that do not work on ARM platforms.
Thus, even though Wintel tablets may still lose in terms of energy efficiency (and, thus, battery life), they will make up for it through convenience and extra functionality.
It should be noted that Clover Trail is not the only push Intel will make on the mobile industry.
The Medfield will precede it, a chip similarly invented for smartphones and slates but which loses to ARM-based competitors both in prowess and energy efficiency.
Whether or not it scores many (or any) design wins remains to be seen.
Ironically, the information on Clover Trail, though promising, may actually make Intel's life difficult by acting as a reason for people to skip on Medfield and hold off until the superior successor arrives.
Then again, it was already clear enough that Medfield was going to be troublesome for the Santa Clara, California-based CPU giant.