Instead, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the company said Clover Trail will be "a Windows 8 chip," according to a Friday in The Inquirer.
Intel apparently offered no real explanation for its decision not to support Linux, but the news is already causing considerable among users of the .
Betting on Windows 8
Clover Trail, of course, is an upcoming version of the low-power Atom processor that's intended specifically for use in tablets, in particular.
Oak Trail is an earlier version that's currently used in tablets from companies including Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Back in June Intel announced that were already in the works using the new Clover Trail chip, including the , which was demonstrated at the Computex show that month.
Signs of Intel's Windows-only focus began to appear in late July, however, when it was reported that the company had to work on Clover Trail tablets.
Now, with this latest move, it's apparently ruling out Linux in general.
Power Management Issues
Given that the tablet category is dominated by Linux-based Android and Unix-based iOS, Intel's move certainly suggests that it has made a deliberate decision to place all its bets on Microsoft's .
On the other hand, Intel did reportedly describe in great detail the new chip's power-management technologies, so--as the Inquirer suggests--it's possible that the simply doesn't yet conform to those requirements.
Indeed, it could hardly be expected to at this point given that the chip is brand-new.
Will that continue to be the case in upcoming versions of the Linux kernel? It seems highly unlikely.
So, this may be just a temporary state of affairs. Of course, whether Intel will then decide to bestow its official "support" on Linux--or whether it will continue to bill Clover Trail as "a Windows 8 chip"--is another question.