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Intel: Dell, Toshiba, Acer tablets coming in 2011

Intel CEO Paul Otellini says is company's chips will be in dozens of tablet designs in 2011, including tablets from Lenovo, Acer, Dell, and Toshiba.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
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Intel CEO Paul Otellini said today that its chips will be in more than 35 different tablet designs in 2011, while clarifying that two lines of Atom processors will be used in tablets.

"We're going to make sure we support all of the viable operating systems that are in the marketplace," Otellini said at the Barclays Capital 2010 Global Technology Conference. The conference audio was streamed live over the Internet.

Intel listed more than 15 brands, including upcoming consumer tablets from Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, and Motion Computing. "A number of them on Windows. A number of them on Android--both Froyo and Honeycomb [versions of Android]," Otellini said.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini said the Atom chip will be in at least 35 tablet designs in 2011. The above slide showed some of those upcoming brands.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini said the Atom chip will be in at least 35 tablet designs in 2011. The above slide showed some of those upcoming brands. Intel

"We have two flavors of products," Otellini said, speaking about the two lines of Atom processors for tablets. "One carries our PC legacy, the codename is Oak Trail. This is for the Windows environment. That's important for people who want the advantage of PC peripheral compatibility. All the printers in the world work, all the USB drivers in the world work. Any PC peripheral will work perfectly well with Oak Trail. [It is a] very solid, high-performance, low-power version of Atom," he said.

Otellini continued. "We have an even more optimized [Atom] version called Moorestown. For people who want the most lightweight, longest battery life, thinnest machine. It doesn't carry the PC compatibility. It's got the x86 instruction set, so Internet compatibility is there, but we're not worrying about legacy support [in Windows]," Otellini said.

"Consumer [tablet] products will roll out in the first half of next year on all three operating systems," he said.

Otellini also reiterated that getting Intel's chips into smartphones will take time. "It's a marathon, not a sprint." He said the second-generation Atom processor for phones, dubbed "Medfield," is "in customer sampling...for shipment [in phones] in 2011 and 2012. You will see smartphones from premier-branded vendors in the marketplace in [the second quarter of] 2011 with Intel silicon inside them."