After years and years of teasing press folks at various trade shows, Intel is finally going to enter the mobile space in 2012. They’re going to do it with Medfield, which is just a fancy way of saying a mobile platform that uses the Intel Atom Z2460 CPU, PowerVR SGX 540 GPU, and the XMM 6260 HSPA+ cellular modem (which maxes out at 21 Mbps by the way). Orange will be one of the first operators to offer a Medfield device to their customers. It looks exactly like the Medfield reference design that Intel demoed at Mobile World Congress last month, except that there’s an Orange sticker on the back of the device. As for when we’ll see handset makers use Medfield, there’s a commitment from Motorola to release a device during the second half of this year, but can you really trust a company’s promise?
Anyway, the meat and potatoes of this story is benchmark numbers. Looking at BrowserMark, Intel’s chip is faster than Apple’s latest and greatest iPhone 4S. Using Vellamo, which is a benchmark written by Qualcomm, it kicks the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy S II LTE into submission. In other words, Intel is blowing everyone out of the water in terms of performance, something we’ve known for a while now, but there’s still a lot of stuff we still don’t yet know. Things like power usage, how long will an Intel based smartphone last on a full charge? And compatibility, will all your Android apps run fine on an Intel chip?
We’ll be honest, 2012 isn’t going to be the year that Intel dominates the mobile space, but that’s not important. What’s important is that Intel will finally have some skin in the game, and anyone who knows anything about Intel knows that these guys play until they own everything. Expect to see Intel make a splash at Mobile World Congress 2013, assuming they start using 22 nanometer chips in smartphones by then.