TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- Your next Windows 8 tablet is going to be a lot faster and more power-efficient. Here at Computex 2013, Intel showed off its upcoming Atom "Bay Trail" processors for Windows and Android devices, which up the low-power ante with quad-core, 22-nanometer processors and support for DirectX 11 graphics. We had a chance to view one of Intel's reference design Bay Trail tablets running Windows 8 and Android 4.2 in action.
The tablet has a 10-inch, 2560 x 1440-pixel screen, and it's able to power all those pixels smoothly as we saw the Android version running a game-engine demo without dropping any frames. Even after running this demo for several minutes, the back of the tablet remained cool to the touch. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to film the game engine demo, but we were able to film the device smoothly flipping through the app menus on the Android 4.2 OS.
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The tablet running Windows 8 had the same exact hardware as its Android-based companion. We watched as an Intel rep flipped through a stock install of Windows 8, but were unable to see any demos that showed the platform's performance or battery life potential. However, we were impressed with the smooth performance in both operating systems and tablet's ability to provide that performance on such a high-resolution screen without emitting much heat.
