Samsung’s Next Android Tablet To Have Intel Atom Inside

The mobile market is a bitter one for Intel at the moment, as up to this point, it's been unable to secure any major design wins using its Atom-based SoCs. There have been a couple of phone releases, but they've been far and few between, and mostly targeted at Europe. A couple of months ago, one win came in the form of ASUS' Fonepad, a 7-inch phablet that looks quite attractive overall, but again, cannot be found in North America. When will Intel ever get that first major win it's looking for?

Soon, actually, if current rumors and leaked benchmarks can be believed. Reports are that Samsung will adopt Atom for use in its upcoming Galaxy Tab 3 10.1. If so, that means that Samsung would have used three entirely different SoCs for each one of its 10.1 models; the original used NVIDIA's Tegra 2, while the second used TI's OMAP4430.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 10.1

What isn't set to change is the number of cores that the SoC has. In the leaked benchmark, the SoC used was Intel's Atom Z2560, a 1.6GHz dual-core. A 400MHz PowerVR SGX chip is used for the graphics. Also unchanged would be the 10.1's resolution of 1280x800. Overall, far from being the most powerful mobile device out there, but for a 7-inch tablet it should be quite capable.

If Samsung really has picked up on Atom here, and it seems likely that it has, then this could prove to be a game-changer for Intel - just the thing it needed. A source at Intel told me earlier that we could expect "many" design wins by the end of the year, so we'll see if that plays out as the company hopes.