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Acer and Lenovo may be readying Windows 8 tablets for summer release

Teaser
The first Windows 8 tablets may skip Intel Medfield for Clover Trail chipsets instead

Android and Apple tablets are looking to be all the rage this CES, but Microsoft has been gearing up to launch its own Windows tablet by the middle of this year.

Sources close to DigiTimes are claiming that Acer and Lenovo are set to release Windows 8 tablets by Q3 2012. In fact, these tablets may even sport Intel’s 32nm Clover Trail platform and may skip Medfield entirely due to performance concerns.

If true, it’s surprising that Acer and Lenovo will not yet be switching to ARM CPUs for the Microsoft tablet as the Windows 8 OS has been built to natively support the ARM architecture in addition to x86. Intel-based tablets in 2011 have performed extremely poorly in the market due to the energy-saving and ubiquity advantages of the ARM architecture (i.e., in Nvidia Tegra, TI OMAP and Qualcomm Snapdragon series).

Still, the advent of Windows 8 tablets is definitely arriving by the end of this year. Whether or not they will make a dent in the tablet market, however, remains to be seen.

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Allen Ngo, 2012-01- 3 (Update: 2012-05-26)