Intel has had a hard time cracking into the tablet market so far -- or smartphones for that matter -- but they are responding to the challenge with new low-power Atom microprocessors aimed specifically at this market. They are also hard at work porting Google's tablet-specific Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, to the x86 architecture, and will reportedly pay a $10 subsidy for each Intel-based tablet shipped in order to attract first-tier notebook vendors.
Going forward the company says it expects to ship more than 35 of Intel's chip-based tablet models through the year -- an unlikely goal considering we're almost halfway through. Intel is also working on a follow up Cedar Trail platform for tablets and its Medfield chip designed for smartphones, though we probably won't see those in the market until 2012.
With ARM currently holding an overwhelming majority of the tablet and smartphone market through licensing agreements, convincing hardware manufacturers to embrace the still-unproven Atom won't be easy. Their debut model, the 1.5 GHz single-core Atom Z670, is said to deliver improved video playback, fast Internet browsing, and longer battery life, without sacrificing performance -- but it's also rumored to cost OEMs three times as much as Tegra 2.
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