The upstream supply chain sources are now chirping just weeks before the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2013 conference taking place in San Francisco from September 10 to 12. They claim that Intel will use this event to reveal its new Bay Trail-T platform for tablets, along with ODMs Asus, Acer and Lenovo who will also reveal their related products.
The Bay Trail platform is the first major Atom release under CEO Brian Krzanich's helm, sporting the 22 nm "Valleyview" Atom chip. As previously reported, the company will supposedly launch the Atom Z-series SoCs (with a target TDP of 3W) for Bay Trail-T platforms designed for tablets between August 28 and September 13 of this year. Intel also plans to launch Bay Trail-M (4W to 6.5W) for notebooks and Bay Trail-D (12W) for desktops.
"What [the Bay Trail platform] really does is allows us to get into these markets that we are not in, in a big way today," Krzanich told analysts in July. "[There will be] tablets [at] $199 and below, some you are going to see even lower, below $150 and much below that as we go through the holiday season. So, Bay Trail, really first and foremost we believe gives solid performance, solid battery life relative to the competition in price points and markets that were simply not in, in a big way today."
The first SoC for Bay Trail, Valleyview, will supposedly feature up to four "Silvermont" 22 nm cores clocked between 1.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz. Each core will also have 512 KB of L2 cache for a total of 2 MB in a quad-core configuration. Other features will include four integrated Gen7 graphics engines, an integrated Imagination Technology VXD392 decode engine, support for hardware accelerated 1080p60 video decode and so on.
Sources now believe that tablets based on the Bay Trail-T platform will go on sale in late October, possibly as Windows 8.1 launch products. Bay Trail-T is expected to help Intel gain more ground in competing against ARM-based solutions that are currently on the market. If Microsoft is willing to reduce its Windows 8.1 licensing fees, tablets based on both platforms could become even more competitive, sources said.
The upstream supply chain birds also claim that Intel's Bay Trail-M for (mobile) notebooks/Ultrabooks will include the Pentium N3510 and Celeron N2910/N2810/N2805 processors. These will supposedly go into mass production soon for notebooks products to be revealed in November or December.
Customers should expect to hear announcements about a large number of new products soon.
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