We saw the Llama mountain 12.5-inch concept announced at Computex yesterday. Its 7.2mm fanless design is enabled by the new 14nm Broadwell-Y based Core M branded CPUs. Today at Computex Intel demonstrated a 10-inch version of that dockable tablet that weighs just 550 grams (1.21 pounds.) That’s as light as any Atom-based 10-inch Windows tablet we’ve seen to date. The thickness is just 6.8mm. This is a breakthrough. A Core-powered fanless tablet at a consumer-friendly weight.
This is only a reference design but it’s working and obviously something that OEMs will be working with to help them produce interesting 2-in-1 and tablet products for Q4 this year. We’re trying to track down some images of the Llama Mountain 10-inch design so check back for more info as we update.
In the same event today Intel also announced more details on RealSense sensors including RealSense Snapshot for depth-enabled photography. [concept video from IDF shown here.]
Intel also announced a new RealSense SDK, a new developer kit, new developer competition and a lot of applications that will be RealSense-enabled. More info on RealSense here.
The press release is here. No information was given on the next-gen Windows tablet platform, Cherry Trail.
With these capabilities is cherry trail needed?
There’s an outstanding question first. Will Cherry Trail (or variants of it) come under the Core M brand? I think not as Core M seems to be specifically the Broadwell 14nm architecture. There’s room for a surprise though.
I’m guessing there’ll be a large enough pricing gap between Atom and Core devices to warrant Atom devices whether or not if there actually is a price difference in costs to OEMs.
On the flipside, with Atom performance increasing – will most average users need Intel Core? :)
It will be interesting to see if Cherry Trail can also achieve a lower weight (imagine a 450g tablet that doubles up to a 900g laptop, at a fraction of the price of a Sony Vaio), or whether it’ll purely just be a differentiation of price/performance.
Smaller tablets will also presumably still use Atom for the near future at least.
>> With these capabilities is cherry trail needed?
Definitely, Intel needs something to stick into some really crappy tablets with 1024×600 TN screens and 512MB of RAM. You’re gonna see it in nearest supermarket between potato chips and bananas :)
These lying bastards give top-rated CPUs for benchmarks to beat ARM, and put slowest low-end CPUs in retail products. As they always did.