Intel is leveraging its solid ties with Taiwan's PC industry to carve out a more substantial market share for tablets, as underscored in the keynote address of Intel President Renée James at Computex. During the event, the chip giant featured its process technology with a 14nm Broadwell-based mobile processor, the Intel Core M processor.

While no technical details were given for the part, James also demonstrated the part in an Intel reference design for a "two-in-one" hybrid notebook/tablet. The design is only 7.2mm thick and only weighs 0.67kg with the keyboard detached. It achieves the thin design by going fanless.

The so-called Llama Mountain platform uses a 12.5-inch QHD (2,560px by 1,440px) display from Sharp. Asus will ship a version of the reference design as the Transformer T300 Chi. Eliminating the fan saves space above the processor, but can only be achieved by keeping active power below just a few watts.

This is a major milestone for Intel's Core family and does overlap with the low-power Atom-based BayTrail processors, which can also be used in fanless designs. But the Atom chips lack the single-thread performance of Intel's Core processors and do not have the same graphics performance. No date was given to production shipments.

For Intel, its greatest advantage is using its process technology to integrate more functions into one piece of silicon. The company's 14nm products are scheduled to ship later this year, and James says Intel can "see clear to 10nm."

With its process lead, Intel expects to deliver lower power and higher performance than existing products—although not always at the same time. James contends that process development fuels the IT industry.

Still, the rest of the mobile processor industry is doing quite nicely with 28nm. James's keynote also didn't account for innovation in design, like heterogeneous computing, that can deliver more performance with less power and fewer transistors.

While companies like Broadcom are looking to exit the broadband market, Intel continues to invest in its LTE business and its low-cost SoFIA platform for Android smartphones and tablets. Intel announced it will bring a quad-core SoFIA LTE part to market in the first half of 2015, and Asus announced a design based on the chip.

This follows last week's announcement of a strategic partnership with China-based Rockchip to develop a 3G quad-core SoFIA part for entry-level tablets. The Intel/Rockchip part is also due in the first half of 2015.

These SoFIA chips are manufactured by TSMC in its fabs and not Intel's own fabs. At this time, Intel's modem technology is only qualified on TSMC's process, so any integrated modem SoC must also be made in TSMC's process.

Taiwan's PC industry has been slow to ramp up tablet designs, as the big names like Apple and Samsung have dominated the market, along with the large contract manufacturers like Foxconn. The low end of the market is being served by the smaller mainland China companies in places like Shenzhen.

Intel included Foxconn in the keynote, where the mainland China company stressed its design capability by talking about its own Bay Trail tablet with full HD display. Foxconn stressed that compact tablet designs require customisation, and its vertical design and manufacturing integration makes it possible to bring custom designs into production in only five months. While there's evidence that the tablet market growth has stalled, the market itself is splintering into many different segments, requiring custom designs for each—there's no one-size-fits-all.

Rounding out the busy keynote was a new Intel PCIe SSD drive for datacenters, where it will compete with Fusion IO, Micron, SanDisk, and others. Separately, Intel's Devil's Canyon gaming platform showed an Intel Core i7 processor with all four CPU cores running at 4GHz, which is great news for high-end gamers.

By: DocMemory
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