This is a very important year for Intel. After nearly half a decade of teasing technology publications with promises of x86 based smartphones, 2012 is when said devices will actually hit the market. Take the Xolo 900 for example. It’s already on sale in India, according to benchmarks it decisively kicks everything in the ass, and best of all it actually has pretty decent battery life. Never heard of Xolo? Neither has the rest of the world. Lenovo and Motorola however, they’re two additional Intel partners who have said that they’re planning to launch x86 based smartphones this year.
The Intel chips that will be inside 2012 smartphones goes by the name Medfield. It’s built using 32 nanometer transistors, it uses a single Atom core, and the built-in cellular modem supports 21 Mbps HSPA+. Last week Intel held their annual Investor Day conference and announced Merrifield. That’ll be built using 22 nanometer transistors, it’ll have a pair of next generation Atom cores, and the cellular modem will be 4G LTE enabled. We wish we could say more, but that’s all Intel wanted to unveil. Every fall they hold a technology focused event, so that’s where we may hear more about Merrifield, but that’s just speculation on our part.
The important question is will the big players (Samsung, Apple, Nokia) start using Intel chips next year or will they stick to the dominate ARM based solutions? Samsung makes a lot of chips, so they have an incentive to not go with Intel. Nokia listens to whatever Microsoft wants them to do, so we’ll have to wait and see what Windows Phone 8 and 8.5 have in store. And as for Apple, they’re a wildcard. Intel’s CEO says his job is to make sure the company makes chips that Apple “can’t ignore”, which means we may see Intel based iPhones and iPads in the not too distant future.