14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may have still failed to bring something massive to the smartphone or even the tablet front, but its IDF exhibition, at least, does suggests it is not finished trying yet.
The tablet segment is not exactly going through any transformations at the moment, not overly major ones at any rate.
Still, this doesn't mean things aren't subtly shifting, or that a move to a new reference design isn't on the way.
Speaking of reference designs, ZiiLABS actually announced this very thing a short time ago, hoping that OEMs would adopt its standard design.
In the meantime, those IT players who think they have something to offer this rapidly growing market have been marshaling their own resources.
As some may know, Intel is one of the bigger names, though its stake in the slate segment has been rather modest so far.
Though there are enough tablet PCs based on x86 CPUs, Intel doesn't really have many media tablets, not enough to stand out from the crowd of ARM-Android ones.
Still, the Santa Clara, California-based company does hope to finally shine, as soon as it finishes the Medfield processor.
Medfield is based on the 32nm manufacturing process and is the item that, Intel hopes, will allow it to finally battle ARM on its own turf (the smartphone market).
Granted, the CPU, and tablets/phones based on it, will only debut at some point during 2012, but this didn't stop Intel from bringing a prototype to IDF.
Indeed, a tablet was put on display, with a screen diagonal of 10 inches (resolution is 1,290 x 800 pixels) and a thickness of 8.9mm.
NFC support is present, apparently, as are two cameras (front and back) and the Android 3.2 Honeycomb operating system (OS) form Google.
The rest of the spec sheet was not disclosed, but it is quite obvious that Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, NAND or HDD storage and RAM will be present and accounted for.
