Get Bay Trail or wait for Cherry Trail for light gaming?

Hello all, 


As many of you may know, Intel has recently been putting in a lot of work to their Atom SOC's in an attempt to combat ARM's dominance in the mobile world. As a result, they recently released their new Bay Trail line of Atom processors and results have been quite impressive.  In the wake of this launch, we have seen quite a few new low power, x86 tablets running a full Windows 8 (not the red-headed stepchild we all know as Windows RT). Being able to have an affordable, lightweight tablet with long battery life that is also able to be used for work and productivity on-the-go has been quite an attractive prospect to many people, myself included. So I went looking at what the different manufacturers had to offer.


After doing some looking around at a few reviews and videos I concluded that the Asus Transformer Book T100TA would be my best bet. Great performance, long battery life, expandable storage, and includes a keyboard dock, all for only $379 for the 64GB version (i'm a broke ass college student so every penny I can save is great). There were some downsides to it compared to other high end tablets like the lower end 1366x768 screen, less premium feel, but all in all it seemed pretty great. To top it all off, one of the biggest advancements that Bay Trail had over Clover Trail was the massive increase in graphics performance of over four times. The improvement was so dramatic that many games that had previously run well into the single digits on fps were now at playable framerates. This is a huge difference and makes this little machine a viable gaming machine for loads of indie games and other more demanding games at low settings (see link below, you might be surprised what this thing can do). So, I was all set and felt comfortable/excited to buy this.... until I heard about Cherry Trail. Cherry Trail being Intel's next iteration of their Atom line which is slated for release in late Q2/ early Q3 2014. The important thing that caught my eye on the list of advantages projected about Clover Trail was its further increased graphics performance. The problem is I have heard all sorts of conflicting claims about how dramatic this performance increase actually is. This is important because as you can probably see from the link I provided the Bay Trail chip is able to offer performance in a lot of games that is ALMOST playable. And I mean so close you can almost taste it (20-25fps in a lot of games). So, this leads me on to my main question:


Do I buy Bay Trail now or do I wait for Cherry Trail?


This is difficult because I would definitely like to get my hands on this thing as soon as possible, but I am willing to wait if the difference is that dramatic. I am completely aware that you can spend your whole life saying, "Well i'll just wait till X releases then i'll buy it" and not actually buy anything, but this is kind of a special exception because Intel is playing very aggressive catchup in an attempt to gain market-share in the mobile field. It would really be eating me for eternity if I ended up going with the Bay Trail and six months later Cherry Trail comes out with double the performance and half of my game library is unplayable on the go. You should all also bear in mind that considering my financial situation and (relatively) competent ability to to resist splurging and reflex purchases, I am going to be stuck with this machine for at least a couple years. This is all also obviously under the assumption that ASUS will be releasing a Cherry Trail option in the same price bracket when it launches, which it probably will... hopefully... okay feel free to chime in any time here, JJ.


Thanks for all the help guys and I hope some of you who are better informed than myself can help me to make the right decision.


Cheers!

-Julian


tl;dr Bay Trail now or wait for Cherry Trail for gaming? 


Example of Bay Trail gaming performance (this guy has loads on his channel): https://www.youtube.com/user/th3drow/videos


The laptop I was looking at:
http://www.amazon.com/Transformer-T100TA-C1-GR-10-1-Inch-Convertible-Touchscreen/dp/B00FFJ0HUE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385343990&sr=8-1&keywords=t100

Most of the time people would say it's not worth waiting, because you might as well your entire life because in a few months something better will come out to be bigger and better. 

 

But in this case, it's not as simple. You're going from unplayable to playable... that's a big difference, much bigger than being able to change settings from High to Ultra. Personally, I would go with it. But I do have to ask, is it going to be your only computing machine? Do you have a desktop? If so, the Nexus 7 may be a great option for you to be able to have your productivity on the go, but a desktop will give you much better value for playing games. Of course, if you only have enough for this tablet and you need something for on the go, I would stick with the Windows 8 Tablet/laptop/whatever they're actually called. To me they really just seem like a rich person's tablet in all honesty. Cool, but not very cost-effective.

 

Anyways, like I said before, the difference in waiting is a much higher matter than typically because again you go from unplayable to playable. Good luck making the right choice for you!

Thank you for the response, and yes, I do have a full gaming desktop (and would never consider giving that up for a gaming laptop). You're right that the Nexus 7 is a great option and it was actually what I was considering before this whole "ultra low power x86" thing came around. However, whenever I thought about the advantages in portability and battery life of the Nexus 7 I was always repelled by the lack of legacy support for loads of programs I use daily like Photoshop and such. Productivity just really isn't close to as strong. At the same time, lugging around a full size laptop wasn't attractive to me either as I have a small monosling backpack that I like to take with me and the idea of carrying and separate/bigger bag just wasn't appealing to me. Also, the Surface Pro 2 and other high end 2-in-1's didn't interest me because of their premium price and battery life. 


This kind of solves all of that for me, and I would have to disagree with you that this is a "rich person tablet", as it is most certainly budget. A 10 inch tablet with a fast chip, 64GB of storage, and an included keyboard dock for $379? Seems like a steal to me.



Anyway either way I appreciate you taking the time to give your imput, but the main question is still unanswered: To Cherry Trail or not to Cherry Trail, and what is the performance differential?

Also I should mention that some of the things that ARE known about Cherry Trail is that it will be based on the 14nm manufacturing process (possble delays then?) and that it will be using a Broadwell-class GPU.

Well as I noted in my response, the difference in from unplayable to playable, so, although I may not have said directly to go with cherry trail, I did say that being what the difference is, go for it.