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Intel Bay Trail, Windows 8.1 to arrive on 8-inch Toshiba tablet

Get ready for a new breed of tablets and hybrids sporting Intel's Atom chip and Windows 8.1. One of the first out of the gate is the Toshiba Encore.

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
Intel 'Silvermont' chip, upon which Bay Trail is based.
Intel 'Silvermont' chip, upon which Bay Trail is based. Intel

With the release of its new 8-inch Encore tablet, Toshiba is expected to provide the first glimpse of Intel's new Atom chip, the Bay Trail-T, powering Windows 8.1, industry sources say.

Bay Trail is a complete redesign of the Atom chip and offers performance that comes closer to Intel's mainstream processors, such as its Celeron and Pentium lines -- roughly twice to three times the performance of the current "Clover Trail" Atom.

Many of the Bay Trail-based tablets are expected to come with the quad-core variant of the Bay Trail processor.

The tablets will offer all this as well as better battery life than what is generated with the Clover Trail Atom, which comes on Windows 8 tablets.

This will be one of the first products sporting Windows 8.1; the RTM code hasn't been released to the general public yet. That will happen in October.

Toshiba is expected to show off the Encore tablet at IFA in Berlin.

Expect many more Bay Trail-based tablets and hybrids in the coming months after Intel highlights the new chip at its annual conference next week.