Could Your Next Phone Have Intel Inside? (Mashable)

Intel has been dying to get its chips into mobile devices for a long time. Almost all phones and tablets today have processors based on the designs of U.K.-based ARM. Now Intel hopes to start chipping away (ouch!) at ARM's near-total market share with a new kind of processor called Medfield. Although the 32-nanometer Medfield chips have been in the works for a while, Intel recently showed off prototypes that use the processor to Technology Review. The company also hyped Medfield in a presentation at a technology conference, revealing some performance benchmarks.

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Intel is mainly known for designing chips that emphasize performance over power efficiency. In other words, their processors have great specs, but they'll suck a phone's battery dry before lunchtime. Intel's tried to make inroads into mobile with its Atom line of processors, which Medfield is a part of, but hasn't had much luck.

Medfield is supposed to change all that. One of the problems Atom has had is that the chips aren't single system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions, so they were never be as compact or as efficient as ARM's designs. Medfield, however, is an SoC design to meet the low-power needs of phones and tablets.

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Now Intel is showing the world just what Medfield can do. The company built a prototype Android smartphone powered by Medfield. About the size of an iPhone 4S but lighter, the phone is said to have fast Web browsing and a "burst mode" for its camera that can capture 15 stills per second, each at 8-megapixels.

In Intel's presentation on Medfield, it said its "reference design" of a Medfield smartphone has best-in-class performance for Web browsing and graphics. (See the slide below.) For final products, however, a lot depends on the manufacturer's implementation.

And of course right now there are no Medfield products, and very few mobile devices with Intel inside. Intel will be showing off its Medfield prototypes at CES in the hope of attracting some interest from manufacturers and partners. Mashable will be there to give our verdict as well.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/semiconductor/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20111221/tc_mashable/could_your_next_phone_have_intel_inside

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