Brace for a Torrent of Tablets

The face of computing may be undergoing a massive change, and tablet PCs appear to be at the heart of it.

"There's a fundamental shift in the computing industry, which is moving to being cloud-based and mobile," Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, told TechNewsWorld.

With its iPad, has a commanding lead, but HP (NYSE: HPQ) and other hardware and software makers could give it a run for its money.
Sales Slump? There's a Tablet for That

It seems as though just about every vendor plans to offer a tablet PC. Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) on Tuesday showed a tablet design at an investor meeting, and the chipmaker's CEO Paul Otellini told attendees that tablet PCs would see a compound annual growth rate of 73 percent to 88 percent.

Annual tablet shipments will hit 50 million to 60 million units by 2014, Otellini also predicted.

In January, Intel introduced its new Moorestown processor architecture at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This is a system-on-a-chip (SOC) consisting of an Intel Atom processor combined with graphics processing, video and memory controller functions. It's aimed at taking on ARM (Nasdaq: ARMHY), a leading processor in the mobile space.

The iPad, for example, runs on a proprietary Apple SOC called the \u201cA4,\u201d which is based on a tweaked ARM Cortex-A9.

Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) is also expected to announce an entry into the tablet space.

"Nvidia will have a lot to talk about at their analyst day this coming Monday (May 17) and at Computex in Taipei," John Jacobs, director of notebook market research at DisplaySearch, told TechNewsWorld.

Computex, one of the world's largest computer industry trade shows, will be held in Taipei, Taiwan June 1-5.