Samsung has booked a London launch for 20th June to announce a Galaxy tablet running Android but with Intel inside. And while it is a victory for the US chip giant, it’s also one which could prove Pyrrhic given the large amount of cash Intel will have to cough.
The tablets will use Intel chips, but Reuters claims to have confirmation that the next Android tablets will also make use of Intel’s Clover Trail+ silicon.
The need to invest a lot of resources isn’t unusual among component suppliers, in the form of loaned engineers and development support – “designing in” as the marketers would have it. In this instance Intel Korea has upped its count of chip engineers from six to 50, and that most of them are working with Samsung.
That’s important, as Samsung’s ATIV range was launched very early this year, using a Core i5 CPU from Samsung presumably integrated with the help of those six engineers.
It could be that Samsung’s new range of ATIV tablets have a radical redesign which needed a hugely inflated engineering team, but given that Windows 8 still only runs on Intel hardware, it would be surprising to see Intel contributing so much to the project.
Getting onto an Android tablet is a different thing entirely, and Intel would spend a lot of money to achieve that. Samsung’s flagship Galaxy series is the best home a chip could hope for, so there’s no reason to doubt the rumours even without confirmation.
But while Samsung might be the most desirable of partners, it’s also the most fickle, switching allegiances where necessary but mostly acting like a serial adulterer – maintaining multiple relationships for fun, and desperately attempting to avoid offending anyone, despite the certain knowledge that eventually it will all come crashing down.
Credit: The Registry
