Intel Corp on Tuesday announced plans to team up with Motorola Mobility Inc and Lenovo to make the first smart phones running on Intel chips.
Lenovo will use a 1.6GHz Atom z2640 chip on a phone to debut in China in the second quarter, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Motorola has also entered into a multi-year, multi-product agreement with Intel, Otellini said.
"The best of Intel computing is coming to smartphones," the Intel chief said. "Our efforts with Lenovo and Motorola Mobility will help to establish Intel processors in smartphones and provide a solid foundation from which to build in 2012 and into the future."
The devices from the two manufacturers represent Intel's belated entry into the surging smartphones market. In contrast to the computer world, where Intel's dominant X86 chip is dominant, most smartphones run on the rival architecture of chips by ARM Holdings Plc, which is thought to be use less power than Intel's chips.
The partnership with Motorola is seen as particularly significant since the company is being taken over by Google Inc, whose Android operating system is, by some counts, the world's most widely used.
"Though there are 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world, less than 800 million are using a smartphone today," said Sanjay Jha, chairman and chief executive of Motorola Mobility.
"With Android as the leading smartphone operating system globally and advancements in computing technology we see tremendous opportunity for the converged devices market."
Intel said that most applications written for ARM chips would with seamlessly with Intel ones, and that it was writing special code to allow the others to be transferred.
Intel showed off a prototype unit, which it said could deliver eight hours of 3G voice calls, six hours of 1080p video playing or five hours of 3G internet browsing.
Published - January 11, 2012 09:45 am IST
