Intel Shows Off Windows 8 Tablets Running Its Clover Trail Chips

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At an event held at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, Intel showed off its Atom Z2760 processors, codenamed Clover Trail. Several manufacturers have committed to using the new chips in their Windows 8 tablets and tablet/laptop hybrids, some of which were also on display.

The Register’s Gavin Clarke noted that nine OEMs have signed on to use the Clover Trail platform: “Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Samsung and ZTE will all ship Windows-8 on Intel x86, the company said.”

Michael Endler from Information Week detailed Clover Trail’s specs: “A dual-core, four-thread system on a chip (SoC), Clover Trail supports clock speeds up to 1.8 GHz and features Intel Burst Technology to dynamically accelerate processing, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology for better multi-tasking, and security perks such as hardware-enhanced encryption. Devices fueled by the next-gen Atom processor can be as thin as 8.5mm and a light as 1.5 pounds. They should also boast more than three weeks of connected standby, 10 hours of active battery life, and standby resume times of under a second.”

“The Clover Trail chip is targeted at low-power-consumption Windows 8 devices that can double as both tablets and laptops,” explained PCWorld’s Loyd Case. “This hardware won’t pack the performance punch of hybrids and full-on Ultrabooks running Core-class silicon, but the devices may be just what consumers and business people need for common productivity applications like Office.”

In Computerworld, James Niccolai noted that many of the tablets on display were designed for business users. “All the vendors played up the consumer appeal of their tablets as well, but there was an underlying theme that x86 and Windows are a better fit for the workplace than iOS.” He added, “Industry analyst Rob Enderle said it’s true that IT departments would rather deal with Windows than iOS tablets. But it’s not IT departments that are driving the tablet market forward, he said, it’s consumers who buy them for themselves or request them at work. For that reason, Enderle said, PC makers still need to win over consumers in order to challenge Apple.”