Intel-Powered Smartphones Arriving Soon

adeelarshad82 writes "After years of promises to enter the smartphone market, Intel has finally done so. During his keynote at CES, Intel's Chief executive Paul Otellini said that Intel has signed Lenovo and Motorola to contracts to use its Atom processors in smartphones. Unlike past launches, Intel has held Medfield back until its partners were ready to go to press as well. According to an early preview, Medfield pairs a 1.6GHz Atom CPU with an SGX540 GPU designed by PowerVR. This is the same GPU we've seen tip up in the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Droid Razr, though Intel is clocking it higher, at 400MHz. Intel's new SoC encodes video at 720p at 30 fps, can playback 1080p at 30 fps, and supports 1920×1080 output via HDMI. The first smartphone to carry an Intel chip will debut on China Unicom during the second quarter."

Re:Another Headache

[Trepidity]

I agree it adds an extra headache for developers, but I like multiple platforms conceptually, because it's an acid-test way of keeping developers from accidentally drifting into platform assumptions that they aren't really supposed to be making, and which will complicate things later. Sometimes even helps find bugs; back when they were more active (and still to some extent), the Debian ports to non-x86 platforms frequently helped uncover latent bugs that were just infrequently triggered on x86 for various coincidental reasons.

Re:You haven't entered the market

[DragonWriter]

You haven't entered the market until the phones are available at retail.

If the market at issue is the retail market for cellphones, there might be some validity to that. The market Intel is actually entering is the market for supplying processors to smartphone manufacturers, which they've entered as soon as they have a product available for those manufacturers to order.

Dull Specs, but battery life?

[tlhIngan]

720p video encoding, 1080p video decoding and 1080p via HDMI are considered stunning features?

Heck, Apple's been conservative, and the iPhone 4s has got 1080p video encoding, 1080p video decode and 1080p via HDMI. Androids have had it in 2010-2011 (and were mocking Apple the whole time).

So... the bigger question is - what's the battery life? The performance looks spectacular, but x86 is a notable power hog. And more worringly, I see nothing in the articles about battery life, power consumption, or battery size.

FFS...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Why do people(TFS and TFA notably not excluded) insist on talking about the part in terms of its GPU performance?

Let's see here... Intel is throwing their hat into the ARM-level power arena... we could discuss how fast their processor is, or we could do a bunch of irrelevant jabbering about how fast the SGX540 that virtually everybody licenses from PowerVR is... Hmm. Hey, let's focus on the part that everybody already knows about and make it even more fascinating by not discussing power for GPU operations; but encode and decode of some (unspecified; but quite possibly a restricted baseline of H.264) 'HD Video' format, and the maximum output resolution!

It's actually a pretty impressive way to natter on about the product without the slightest mention of what may or may not make it interesting. In other news, it is probably made of silicon, and in some sort of density-optimized epoxy package!

PowerVR?

[jginspace]

PowerVR drivers [fsf.org] anyone?

Re:You haven't entered the market

[gregrah]

Agreed that Intel entering the smartphone market is not going to have the same impact on smartphone users as the announcement of a new or improved OS, for example. However, as consumers we are all likely to benefit from the competition.

As an Intel shareholder, though, I am very excited by this announcement.

Re:Dull Specs, but battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather ask "which pocket device on the market has lens that deserve 1920x1080 resolution"

That's only 2 megapixels...