14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Intel really does intend to speed things up on the mobile processor market, having gone as far as to showcase a tablet Medfield design running the Android 3.0 operating system.
The 2011 edition of the Computex trade show is well underway, and Intel is, of course, in the thick of things.
Although its processor platform isn't doing particularly well on the tablet segment at the moment, the outfit means to change this before the year is out.
To that end, it announced that it would be accelerating the development of the Atom series of central processing units.
In other words, the rate at which new Atom chips will come out will speed up compared to all others, which will continue to adhere to Moore's Law.
Turns out this extends to the Medfield line of system-on-chip (SoC) devices, which haven't really even been unleashed yet.
Among other things, the processor will be highly integrated and should surpass the performance of current platforms.
No doubt its maker is taking steps towards making this SoC into a good opponent for the NVIDIA Kal El quad-core Tegra generation.
Exact specs are still unknown, but the 32nm high-k metal gate manufacturing processing technology will be utilized in its making.
Low power consumption is one of, if not the main focus (battery power should last all day), as long as performance is high and the form factor can go under 9mm in thickness (tablet weight should end up at 1.5 pounds or so.
Intel even illustrated its intent by making sure that one of the tablets it put on show ran an early prototype of the Medfield and the Android 3.0 OS (MeeGo and Windows will also be supported).
The first complete units will start showing up later this year, but tablets powered by them aren't expected before the first half of 2012.