Motorola and Intel Announcement Tomorrow – Likely to Be CloverTrail Tablet with Jelly Bean

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Categorized | Opinion

Tags : android, clover trail, intel, jelly bean, motorola, Z2580

Motorola and Intel Announcement Tomorrow – Likely to Be CloverTrail Tablet with Jelly Bean

Posted on 17 September 2012 By Steve Chippy Paine

Opinion – The most likely scenario for tomorrow’s Motorola / Intel announcement is a Wi-Fi only CloverTrail tablet with dual-core 1.8Ghz and Jelly Bean.

There was a private meeting at IDF 2012 about CloverTrail at IDF and I wasn’t invited; Which is fine by me because there’s enough information being given at IDF to know, with some confidence, what’s going to happen tomorrow when Motorola get together with Intel for their Edge-to-Edge announcement.

CloverTrail is the next generation of Atom-based tablet platform and it’s about to become available right now. We know that because the ASUS Vivo Tab is about to become available, the HP Envy X2 is about to become available and the Acer W510 is about to become available. All three are based on a version of Clovertrail that supports Windows 8 – the Z2670, a 1.8Ghz dual-core SOC with hyperthreading, new low power states, new graphics subsystem, an image processor and enhanced security. It supports an 8MP camera, NFC, up to 64GB of storage, a bunch of sensors and various communications radios. Designs based on this SoC can be down to 8.5mm thick. The new low-power states allows the device to run in Windows 8 Connected Standby mode (AOAC.)

Videos of Windows 8 Tablets available here and here.

It’s an exciting platform but there’s one element of it that doesn’t fit with Motorola, a Google company. Windows 8. Intel are happy to talk about Windows 8 on CloverTrail but not Android – that’s part of their smartphone platform – but that could be what’s being kept back for tomorrow’s announcement.

Remember back in Feb we heard about new versions of the Atom platform for smartphones? Intel announced that a Z2xxx ‘value’ part and a Z2580 performance part would be available.

The Z2580 will be a (max turbo) 1.8Ghz dual-core hyperthreading Cloverview processor with PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU running at 533MHz.

There’s another little problem though and that’s availability. We were expecting the smartphone platforms to be ready in early 2013. Could it be that Intel have a Wi-Fi only part ready already?

The most likely scenario for tomorrow is not a smartphone but a Tablet based on a Wi-Fi-only Clovertrail+ Z2580. Jelly Bean has been announced for Medfield so a re-build for Clovertrail is unlikely to take long. If Motorola have availability of a Wi-Fi-only part in Oct/Nov and a 3G/LTE version in Jan, it seems to fit potential timescales. A surprise announcement could be a smartphone based on the same CPU in Q1 2013.

3 Responses to “Motorola and Intel Announcement Tomorrow – Likely to Be CloverTrail Tablet with Jelly Bean”

Czarnikjak says:

September 17, 2012 at 8:37 am

Chippy, do we know something about performance of clover trail on new windows 8 slates/convertibles due out soon?
Would it be sufficient to use one of these tablets as a core for the one and only, modular pc?
Or core CPU like in surface pro would be necessary?
- Ben Lang says:
  
  September 17, 2012 at 9:07 am
  
  Haswell might be a better option for a highly modular PC as it has a better HDR than CloverTrail, which is necessary if you want a powerful desktop computer scenario.
- James says:
  
  September 23, 2012 at 4:40 am
  
  Details so far on Clover Trail…
  
  Model Z2760 is a dual core Medfield type SoC ATOM, maybe 1.8GHz (speed not yet verified) with unknown Burst Mode speed (Clover Trail is based on Medfield).
  
  WEI Score on Acer W510, Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, and HP Envy X2 indicate a score of 3.3 with a break down on the Lenovo as follows…
  
  3.4 for CPU
  4.7 for RAM
  3.8 for Graphics
  3.3 for Gaming Performance (may change if drivers are immature)
  5.6 for Primary Drive
  
  So basically performance is about that of the Cedar Trail Dual Core 1.86GHz N2800. Max TDP is only 2W though (SoC), compared to the N2800′s 8W (6.5 for the N2800 and 1.5W for the NM10 South Bridge)
  
  Run times have to be confirmed and we’ll need better benchmarks than WEI score but passmark score has apparently also been released for Clover Trail at 705, while N2800 scores 699… We just have to wait on better benchmarks and user reviews to get a better sense of overall performance but it looks like it might actually be fairly good.
  
  However, it’s still a netbook range product… So depending on what you want to do with the system it’s likely you may want to wait till the Core i-series models come out but the next gen Haswell update may not come out till the second half of next year.
  
  Though, if any of the upcoming models offer user replaceable batteries then the shorter run times may not be so bad for present generation Ivy Bridge based models.
  
  While the significantly increased graphical performance Haswell will offer may be worth the wait… You’re call…