Intel hopes to boost its business selling chips to phone makers --
now the domain of rival ARM -- through a partnership announced this week
with Google to develop future Android OS versions for mobile devices with Intel chips.
Intel
and Google will jointly tune Android code at the kernel and driver
level so that future Android versions work with Intel-based smartphones
and tablets. The partnership was announced at the Intel Developer Forum
in San Francisco, where Intel showed working units of a smartphone with
Android 2.3, code-named "Gingerbread," and a tablet with Android 3.0,
code-named "Honeycomb." Both the devices ran on an Intel Atom chip
code-named Medfield.
Intel officials said a smartphone with Medfield and Android would come in the first half next year.
Intel
has made runs at the smartphone market over the past two years, but no
handsets with Intel chips are yet available. Intel last year partnered
with Nokia to develop the Linux-based MeeGo OS for smartphones, but
Nokia abandoned the effort after adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone OS
for future smartphones.
The partnership with Google shows that Intel is serious about
smartphones and on target to deliver a handset next year, said Dave
Whalen, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group and general
manager of the Ultra Mobility Group, in an interview.
"What this
does specifically for the phone business is it validates to the
marketplace and most importantly to the ecosystem that Intel is now in
business," Whalen said, adding that the company was standing behind the
development of MeeGo.
Intel's Atom chips are considered more
power-hungry than ARM processors, which are in most smartphones today.
But Whalen said that the Medfield chip is competitive, and that phone
chips would improve over time as Intel engineers chips to smaller
geometries, which would help reduce power consumption and drive up
performance.
"Everybody is interested in alternatives," Whalen
said. "The OEMs that we are working with that looked at our road map
feel comfortable that it's going to be competitive."
Intel is
pinning its hopes on its manufacturing technology, which it advances
every two years, to catch up with ARM on power efficiency. The Medfield
chip is manufactured using the 32-nanometer manufacturing process. New
Atom designs are under development for the 22-nm process, with
manufacturing beginning late this year. Intel will use the 14-nm process
for its Atom processors by 2014.
The Intel-Google deal will help
the chip maker design better phone chips optimized to run the software,
said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president of the Intel
Architecture Group, in an interview.
Moreover, Intel has an
advantage over ARM of having software engineers, chip designers and
manufacturing experts in-house, which in the long run will be an
advantage for the company over ARM, Perlmutter said. ARM licenses
processor designs to chip makers, who then hire third-party fabs to make
the chips.
"I think it is a juggernaut that is going to be hard
for ARM to duplicate. They don't have the capabilities Intel has,"
Perlmutter said.
The Intel-Google partnership brings OS stability
to mobile devices with Intel chips, but what it means to end users is
yet to be seen, said Michael Gartenberg, technology analyst at Gartner.
"It
makes sense as it extends the reach of both Android to new processors
and Intel chips to new platforms, especially for Intel now that MeeGo
has very little momentum behind it," Gartenberg said.
The
partnership benefits Intel's developer partners, who can move on without
worrying about MeeGo's uncertainty, said Charles King, principal
analyst at Pund-IT. With more users adopting mobile devices, there's
room for Intel to compete with ARM. ARM may be difficult to unseat
though, King said.
