We have covered many devices at MWC, now it’s Intel’s turn. Intel’s CEO started by saying “Moore’s law is not actually a law”, and they have managed to go past it by introducing smaller chips at a faster rate. They also showcased all the open platforms they have been working on both hardware and software wise, including Android and Tizen. They also made all the people present realize that they are not new to the mobile game as they shipped around 400 million RF chips for smartphones and tablets last year. Well this press conference was all about smartphones and who all Intel is partnering with to introduce its Medifield line of mobile application processors.
Medifield is a reference design hardware platform which will be used in many mobile phones to come. The first partner to be introduced was Lenovo who will be coming out with Lenovo K800 which will be launching with China Unicom in Q2 2012 this will be the first Medifield smartphone to be launched. This device has everything from fast camera to great battery life (14 days of battery life).
Next up was Orange with Santa Clara, Yves from Orange believes that Intel-powered Android smartphone is the way to go and get people to sign up which will also give better network and speed. From India, they have partnered with Lava who will be launching the Xolo series and he also showed us the Xolo X900 which had a 1.6 GHz Medifield processor inside and a 400 MHz Graphic processor. From China they have partnered with ZTE who just said that they will be shipping their first Medifield devices in the second half of the year. We also know that they will be partnering with Motorola but no details about this was given out.
Next up they have also partnered with Visa, at first they showed us that mobile payments have increased a lot and showed us some statistics from Gartner saying that $140b mobile payments will be transacted this year by about 185 million people. They also announced Visa mobile payments for Intel powered phones and also showcased Visa PayWave transactions.
In the end Intel talked about their roadmap and showed us 3 lines of processor, the Intel Atom Z2000 1 GHz processor is a low end processor which will power the entry level smartphones and the price of devices with this processor will be around $150, second one is the Z2460 which is clocked at 2 GHz and is a high performance processor, the last one is the Z2580 which is said to give 2X performance of the Z2460. This line up is really nice but how powerful it really is we have no idea because we have no idea about the GPU or the basic architecture of these chips. They also talked about the chip Die size and said that this year they will be bringing 32nm, next year a 22nm, and 14nm in 2014. This really proves Moore’s love wrong, but we shall see when it really happens.
Image Courtesy: The Verge
