My Blog: Intel talks Medfield: will ship in a phone and have the longest usage time

Monday, February 14, 2011

Intel talks Medfield: will ship in a phone and have the longest usage time

We had a feeling we'd be hearing about Intel's Atom for smartphones here at Mobile World Congress, and Intel did in fact take the stage today to talk about its forthcoming Medfield processor. The company has announced that it is starting to sample or test its 32nm Medfield processor for mobile devices with its customers (obviously, it's not telling us with ones) and more importantly that it will ship in a phone. Yep, Intel's Senior Vice President Anand Chandrasekher spoke quite firmly about how the platform will in fact ship in smartphones and that it will also support Android. He pulled out the phone above just as a proof point, and while he didn't say who made it, we have a sneaking suspicion it is that Aava Mobile phone we've heard about.

Chandraskher also took direct aim at ARM (he even called out ARM's CEO Warren East), and hammered home Intel's focus on battery life. He didn't quote exact run time, but he did say that "on active power we are most efficient architecture on the planet." We actually believe he repeated that will have the "longest usage time" at least three times. What about standby? He was a bit more vague on that, but did say it would be competitive there as well. We'll be doing our best to track down that Medfield-powered handset up there, so stay tuned.

Update: Our friend Chippy from CarryPad caught a bit of Aand's talk on video. Hit the break for that.

Gallery: Intel at MWC - Medfield preview