IDG News Service - Intel is going after the tablet market for its low-power processors, including an upcoming Atom processor designed for mobile phones, the company said.

Earlier this week, OpenPeak released a reference design for a tablet using one of those upcoming chips, code-named Moorestown. The tablet will have an Atom-based CPU. The OpenTablet 7 tablet comes with a touchscreen is designed for multimedia and video communications, the company said. It is as slim as a photo frame, and weighs 1.15 pounds (0.52 kilograms), the company said.

Tablets are a potential growth area for newer and upcoming low-power, low-cost Atom processors, said Suzy Ramirez, an Intel spokeswoman.

"But it is by no means confined to Atom -- Intel has a range of products that will enable various tablet computing designs," Ramirez said. She did not specify which chips.

Smartphones with the Moorestown chip have already been shown. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Intel's CEO Paul Otellini showed LG Electronics' GW990 smartphone, which uses that chip and is scheduled to ship later this year. Finnish company Aava Mobile also showed a smartphone prototype with the Moorestown chip at the Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona.

The OpenTablet reference design will ship in the second half of this year, OpenPeak said. Intel has pegged release for the Moorestown chip at around the same time.

Intel has little presence in the mobile space beyond netbooks, most of which carry Atom chips, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. Because the growth rate for PC sales continues to slow, Intel has to look at new markets like tablets and smartphones to grow, McCarron said. A year ago, Intel said would spend $7 billion over two years to revamp manufacturing plants in an effort to make smaller, more power-efficient chips as it tries to enter new markets.

Tablets and smartphones require low-power processors, so Atom is the chip for the company to use to jump into new markets, McCarron said. The Atom processor is based on the x86 architecture used in laptop and desktop chips, and Moorestown is perhaps Intel's first low-power x86 chip that can fit into devices out laptops and netbooks, McCarron said.

"Ultimately that's Intel's goal -- not world domination, but x86 domination," McCarron said. "They want to push x86 down to as many market segments as they can."

However, Intel faces a big challenger in rival Arm, whose processors go into most smartphones and are quickly making their way into tablets. Many tablets shown at CES in January use Arm processors. Companies like Dell and Lenovo have already announced tablets with Arm chips. Apple's iPad tablet contains an Apple A4 chip, which is also rumored to have an Arm processor.

Despite Intel's efforts, Arm is a step ahead in developing lower-power processors that may be ideal for tablets or smartphones, McCarron said. Intel has attempted to reduce Atom's power consumption, but it could take years for Intel to come close to catching up with Arm, McCarron said.

Like the GW990 by lg uses Moorestown Chips

Some thing about the GW990-

LG surprised everyone with a (literally) huge new smartphone—the GW990, the first phone built on Intel's Moorestown platform, using Intel's Moblin Linux operating system. I got some close-up, quality time with the phone today.

For one thing, the GW990 is huge. It's a thick brick with a 4.8-inch, 1024-by-480 display that's positively gorgeous. The phone strains the concept of "pocketable." Intel's chips have been criticized for not lending themselves to lightweight or slim devices, and the GW990 doesn't do much to dispel that idea.

The GW990 gets about 4 hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby on its 1850 mAh battery. It has a 5-megapixel camera on the back; so far, so normal.

But it runs a unique operating system: Intel's Moblin, a Linux variant whose interface is a bit similar to Android. There's very little in the way of a developer community so far for Moblin, which has been Intel's showcase OS for mobile internet devices. LG execs at the show said they're working on getting third-party applications written for the GW990, but they know it might be tough until more Moblin devices hit the market.

LG has enhanced Moblin with its S-Class user interface, which has big, colorful lines of icons and some 3D effects. For instance, you can flip through contacts or photos like on a Rolodex. Parts of S-Class have also appeared on the 1 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered LG Expo for AT&T, a Windows Mobile smartphone. So it's clear that LG is trying to give their various smartphones a consistent interface, no matter what OS they're running.

Moblin multitasks beautifully on the Intel Atom CPU. Yes, it's basically using a laptop-class CPU, in some ways similar to the one in the laptop I've been writing my CES coverage on. I watched a movie playing at the same time as the demonstrator edited a text message and checked his calendar.

But I don't know if the awesome screen outweighs the slightly awkward size and weight of the device. The GW990 felt like an "I can do this!" technology demo rather than a gadget designed to grab existing smartphone consumers.

LG said the GW990 will come to market in Korea in the second half of this year. They don't have any plans yet to bring it to the U.S.

-chris tulsei-3b1