In IDF’s technology showcase, we got a chance to catch up with OpenPeak, makers of the OpenTablet 7, a 7” Android tablet running atop the Moorestown Atom Z6xx SoC. The OpenTablet 7 is a reference design created for ODMs to rebrand and customize as they want. It will be on sale later this year as an AT&T branded product bundled with their 3G connectivity and also serves as the basis for Cisco’s Cius business-centric videoconferencing tablet.

We’ve seen the OpenPeak before, having played with an earlier prototype at CES in January, but the real story is that we got performance benchmarks from the Moorestown-based tablet. Read on to see our preliminary findings on what Intel’s new SoC can do.

For those of you who haven't read today's Moorestown Architecture article I'd highly recommend it. This is quite possibly one of the biggest introductions we've seen in the past couple of years. I'd say that by the end of 2011 we could be looking at a dramatically different smartphone landscape.

One gem I snuck into the article was the fact that Intel has no current plans to support Windows Phone 7 or even Windows Phone 8 after it. The allegation is that Microsoft's roadmap isn't aggressive enough on the performance side. Intel needs OSes that can demand much higher performance in order to showcase Moorestown. If a 1.5GHz Moorestown performs no different than a 1GHz Snapdragon, Intel loses one of its major advantages.

This is potentially very telling about the sort of market Microsoft is going after with Windows Phone 7. If it's not the high end smartphone user, then perhaps MS is implementing more of a sweet spot strategy and targeting the informed mainstream consumer? There's also the flipside. Perhaps this is all political and there are other reasons at play for not supporting Windows Phone 7.

Based on what I've seen thus far, not having Moorestown support appears to be a bad thing.