Chipmaker's tablet processor will come to Android tablets in the second quarter, said CEO

by Brooke Crothers





Dell's Venue 8 Android tablet uses an older Intel chip not the newest Bay Trail.

(Credit: Dell)

Intel's quad-core Atom processor will come to Android tablets in the second quarter, CEO Brian Krzanich said Thursday during a quarterly earnings conference call with analysts.

"Most of the Bay Trail Android tablets really start showing up more in Q2...remember we made a shift, the original program for Bay Trail was all Windows," he said during Intel's fourth-quarter earnings conference call.

He went on to explain that there was a shift mid-stream to Android, thus the delay in Bay Trail Android tablets.

Android devices running on the Bay Trail processor were conspicuously absent at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. Intel's CES pavilion, for instance, had no Bay Trail Android tablets on display.

During the conference call, Krzanich also talked about the advantages of its 64-bit chips when responding to an analyst's question (transcript courtesy of Seeking Alpha). Android today is a 32-bit platform.


[Device makers] who build with our products now can already go out and start to utilize 64-bit. We are out there working with the OSs, all of the OSs and the OEMs to go enable that. The real usages...are going to be in those high compute areas, things like video, things like media, transfer media manipulation. All the classic things around computing that you saw drive the compute cycles on PC and people are doing more and more with tablets and phones or that will be the same things that drive 64-bit utilization on these mobile devices.