We spent some time at Intel’s cafeteria, benchmarking the food against Nvidia’s cafeteria, and talking about the future of Intel between bites. According to some PR chaps we talked to, the future for Intel is ultrabook.

It’s a skinny notebook that can do more than a tablet, runs Windows 7 and can offer some decent battery life, like eight or more hours in the best case scenario, and all that should not cost more than $999.

Intel expects to showcase many design wins IDF that starts of September 13th in San Francisco, and many of the machines have already made an early appearance at Berlin’s IFA consumer show.

The big issue is how the market reacts on these rather expensive machines, but Intel hopes that business consumers won’t mind spending at least $999 and up for skinny, light and sexy notebook, that should be their main tool to fight tablets.

Intel reminds us that it has a tablet chip, Oak Trail Atom Z670, and that in 2012 it plans a 32nm Atom Cedar Trail version of its tablet chip. This should happen sooner in 2012 rather than later. Intel also thinks that Windows 8 will make a big difference in this market.

Intel also reminded us that tablets didn’t really happen this year for anyone but Apple, and that Android and ARM partners have miles to go before they pose a serious threat to Apple. Still, tablets did start to make a difference in the second part of 2011, but we believe that no one made big bucks out of them, aside from Apple of course.