Intel on a smartphone? You better believe it. While ARM processors might be the masters of the mobile world, Intel hopes that its Atom Medfield processors can help them win over the mobile world. Most of the existing Medfield-based Android smartphones have been relegated to the Chinese market- but no longer.

Today Motorola announced the RAZR i, which is essentially the same thing as the RAZR M, except for it switches out the ARM processor for an Intel x86 processor. The RAZR I will only be a single core processor, but it runs at 2GHz and is said to surpass the performance of comparable ARM dual-cores.

The rest of the specs will stay rather true to the RAZR M, including a 4.3-inch screen, a 960×540 AMOLED display, NFC, 8MP camera and storage options of 8, 16 or 32GB with the option to expand through microSD.

The RAZR i will run on ICS, though Motorola says that Jelly Bean is coming down the road. Pricing has yet to be announced, but it is expected to be released in early October for the European and Latin American markets. As for the U.S and Canada? No word on whether they will see the light of day around these parts, at least for now.

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Intel CEO Paul Otellini said at an investor meeting that their first ATOM Medfield phone is on its way out the door this week. The bad news is that it is likely going to be the Lava Xolo X900 in India or the Lenovo K800 in China, so no Medfield for any of the major markets just yet. It seems that they are coming though, it’s only a matter of time.

The bigger question is whether or not you should even care. That’s a hard one, as ARM choices are already pretty good. Still, there are some reasons to consider an ATOM-based phone in the future, such as speed. A single-core Atom Medfield is supposedly slightly faster than the new Tegra 3. That’s not too shabby.  What about app compatibility though? This should only be a problem with apps that call native libraries that are ARM native, such as intensive 3D games. According to Intel, that’s about 25% of the market. Their solution? Binary translation. Basically they will translate ARM binaries on the fly during execution which should bring the phone to about 90% compatibility with the entire Market. Will it really work that well? That remains seen.

Intel does not have an easy road ahead of it in the mobile phone world. In the end though, will their efforts pay off and over us great, speedy phones or, conversely, will we be left with phones that can run many 3D games out on the market and go through batteries like they are nothing? Only time will tell. For a hands-on look at the K800, and to see a small glimpse of the future of Intel phones, check out the video below, courtesy of the Verge.

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With Microsoft Windows 8 getting ARM processor support, now more than ever Intel needs to step up its mobile game in order to stay competitive with its upcoming Windows tablets and current-gen mobile technology.

And step it up Intel has.

On the smartphone scene, Intel is preparing to show off its Medfield Android-based devices at CES 2012. Meanwhile, anonymous sources from Acer and Lenovo component suppliers have released a new rumor that both vendors are in fact working on next-gen Windows 8 x86 tablets that will run on Intel’s upcoming “Clover Trail” chipset.

While no specifics regarding Clover Trail have been revealed, it is believed these next-gen Atom processors will be able to compete much closer with ARM competitors in both power-consumption and overall performance.

Tablets running Clover Trail, like those from Acer and Lenovo, are not expected to hit the market until late-2012.

While I wish Intel the best, so far all the cards lay in favor of ARM on the mobile front, of course, you never know. Perhaps Intel really does have some tricks up its sleeves that will finally shift the battle in its favor.

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For those who don’t know, Intel has been talking for a while about upcoming mobile solutions that can better compete with ARM processors. One such technology is Intel’s Medfield, a system-on-a-chip, which will appear at the upcoming 2012 CES.

The technology will be showcased through LG hardware, and will operate Android as its OS. Although LG is going to be the company to first show off a smartphone running on the platform, according to some executives it may never actually release such phones.

A high-ranking executive at LG, who wished to remain anonymous had this to say:

“personally, I doubt that LG Electronics will release phones running on Android software based on any Intel platform. It’s quite possible for LG to push Intel’s reference mobiles but with huge subsidies from Intel for promotion.”

This means that Intel is paying LG to develop a test smartphone for displaying purposes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the LG model will become an official product.

While I personal believe that ARM just works better on the ultra-mobile side of the fence, at least its good to see that Intel is attempting to push the envelope in different directions with the x86 platform. Will 2012 be the year that Intel finally becomes recognized in the mobile industry? It’s hard to say, but until we really see a Medfield handset in action, all we can do is speculate.

Intel claims that the first commercial headsets running the new technology will hopefully surface by March.

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Intel Medfield chips were shown in Nokia devices that were supposed to run MeeGo back in February. At that time, some specs were leaked for the chip.

Medfield x86 architecture with 2 CPU’s being recognized by the logging software, achieved either through hyper-threading or multiple CPU cores. Which of the two is not explicitly verified. A maximum clock speed of 1.6 GHz a minimum clock of 200Mhz with a number of intermediate clock steps in between allowing for variable performance.

Using a synthetic Linux Benchmark (probably Quadrant) a score  of 6389.62 BogoMIPS was achieved. Comparatively speaking, Tegra 2 on the Optimus 2X manages to get a score of just 2391 BogoMIPS using a similar synthetic test. The caveat here is that the test on the Optimus is not optimised for multiple cores. How much is optimized for dual-core Medfield is anybody’s guess though. However, even if you assumed a generous improvement of 2 times the single core performance, there is still significant headroom as far as the Intel chip and raw CPU performance is concerned.

As for RAM, it’s 1 GB reported for Nokia device. While ROM and RAM size will likely differ in retail devices, 1 GB of RAM is on hand. There also appears to be up to 500 MB of graphics memory on tap using Intel’s dynamic memory allocation but the amount integrated on the graphics core is uncertain.

However, it’s not clear whether the Medfield chip used in Android phone, or tablet demoed last week is the same as in that doomed Nokia device of last February. If it is, which is quite probable, the extra dedicated graphic RAM of 500 MB is quite essential for graphics intensive tasks such as 1080p video decoding and 1080p encoding (stress is mine, as I wanted to outline a much more computing intensive task than just 1080p HD video decoding). GPU itself is described as PowerVR SGX core, though the specifics of said core are still unknown. GPU and associated Image Processor information is not available but 1080p encode and decode are expected. The GPU core is known to be clocked at 200 MHz, which is pretty slack for today’s SGX cores that reach 350 MHz and faster clock rates.

Medfield is the first Intel chip that follows the proven and obvious ARM design guidelines: it’s a System-on-Chip (SoC) rather than CPU and GPU and I/O and whatnot chips and circuits scattered over motherboard, like it was with previous Intel Atom-based designs.

Stephen Smith, Vice President of Intel’s Architecture Group tells us that this Gingerbread Medfield phone was powerful and pleasing to use, on a par with the latest iPhone and Android handsets. It could play Blu-Ray-quality video and stream it to a TV if desired; Web browsing was smooth and fast. Smith also says Intel has built circuits into the Medfield chip specifically to speed up Android apps and Web browsing. As of today, it’s a mystery what exactly were these magic circuits were before they were backed into that matte black Medfield chip.

Bigger than iPad Medfield-based tablet was also mentioned, but there’s no reaction to it in the press: this tablet prototype might need something of Ice Cream Sandwich to run really good. A special Intel’s fork of ICS obviously  is not ready for x86 architecture just yet.  I wonder how good Windows Phone 7 would run on that Medfield phone? Or Windows 8, on that Medfield tablet?

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The announcement isn’t new — Intel said it was going to do this — but now we’re getting our first real look at a phone powered by Medfield. Sort of. What you see here is a shot of Anand Chandrasekher holding a Medfield-powered phone. He’s the VP and GM of the Intel Ultra Mobility Group.

So, what do we know about this handset? Not much, unfortunately. The Medfield processor is supposed to rival the ARM chipsets, providing plenty of horsepower with minimal power consumption. The expectation is that Intel will, at the very least, be working with Nokia on something. The Nokia N9, for example, could get a 1.2GHz Medfield to go along with its MWC debut, dropping the physical keyboard in the process. There’s also word of a MeeGo tablet with Medfield.

Will Intel work with the Android crew too? How about its old buddies at Microsoft for Windows Phone 7? From Hummingbird to A4 (and soon A5), there certainly is no shortage of mobile processor options these days.

[Maemo via Twitter]

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