Intel wants to do big things in 2014: they want to get their Atom chips inside 40 million tablets, which would make it 4 times the number of slates that had Intel CPUs inside in 2013. They have a new plan to do that, since they intend to pay tablet makers to use their chips.
They’ve got a program for that, first disclosed at the financial analyst meeting in November. Basically, the chipmaker pays tablet makers to cover extra component costs of using the Bay Trail chips and also helps with the engineering costs of designing an Intel based slate. This means that Intel will have to do a serious investment in order to finance those new tablets.
Even big players like Samsung are expected to adopt the platform and the company behind the Bay Trail series has already committed to Android devices with such chips from Q2. The idea of paying partners to adopt your technology is not new, since Microsoft has done it before with Windows Phone device makers and supposedly it will do it again soon.
In the case of Intel money is used to lure away companies from the ARM chip designs. However, their variety is the one appealing here, with cheap models like MediaTek being a really good idea.
