14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Pine Trail platform had a fairly good run, but it is almost type for it to hand the field over to its successor, the Oak Trail, which might just prove quite formidable, despite rumors claiming the contrary.
Consumer up to speed with such things will know that Intel Atom CPUs lie at the heart of almost all nettops and netbooks released throughout the whole of 2010.
Also, during the later parts of last year, some Windows 7 tablets also adopted the Pine Trail Atom chips.
As end-users will no doubt know, the successor to Intel's Pine Trail platform, Oak Trail as it is dubbed, has already shown up in various products during the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show.
Granted, the attention of the media may was not completely captured by those devices, what with AMD's Fusion and Intel's own Sandy Bridge second generation Core processors.
There were also some rumors circulating around the web, according to which notebook brands supposedly aren't very interested in Oak Trail.
Now, it is stated, in an even more recent report, that the first half of the year will actually have its fare share of Oak Trail-based devices.
This should include netbooks (entry-level mobile personal computers) as well as tablets.
In fact, the Santa Clara, California-based company is even working with some notebook brands on Atom-based tablets.
Basically, about 35 products powered by the new batch of Atom CPUs (central processing units) will show up in the first half of 2011 alone, them being part of the more than 100 new netbooks and tablets Intel expects to power.
Unfortunately, no names were given, meaning that whatever companies Intel is talking about, as well as their respective electronics, will remain shrouded in mystery until such a moment as the CPU maker decides it is time to send out more palpable information.