Intel Unveils First Ever Smartphone Featuring x86 Microprocessors

At the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, Intel Corp. introduced the world's first smartphone based on the company's Atom Z2460 platform formerly code-named Medfield. The new Lenovo K800 handset will be available in Q2 2012 in China and will be the first smartphone ever to use an x86 microprocessor.

Liu Jun, Lenovo senior vice president and president of mobile Internet and digital home, joined Paul Otellini, chief exec of Intel onstage to debut the Lenovo K800 smartphone based on Intel Z2460 and running the Google Android operating system with Lenovo LeOS user interface for a localized experience in China. Liu Jun said the K800 smartphone will be available in China in the second quarter and will run on China Unicom’s 21Mb/s network. The smartphone features support for HSPA+ with the Intel XMM 6260 platform.

No precise specifications of the Lenovo K800 are available at the moment, but what is known is that the device sports 4.5" screen (with up to 1280*1024 resolution) and has Hyper-Threading technology activated, which points to the fact that the K800 belongs to high-end (so-called "superphones") breed of products.

During the CES 2012, the world's largest maker of chips also disclosed peculiarities of Atom Z2460/Medfield system-on-chip, which will be Intel's third attempt to enter the market of smartphones.



Intel Medfield is powered by Atom architecture 1.60GHz x86 core with Hyper-Threading technology, enhanced Intel Deeper Sleep, C6E estate, S0i1/S0i3 power reduction features and 512KB of cache. The SoC also includes Intel GMA graphics core (OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL 2.1, OpenVG 1.1, 400MHz) with hardware accelerated high-definition 1080p video playback, 32-bit LPDDR2 memory controller, Intel's new image signal processor and various improvements to speed up various multimedia or security demands. The Atom Z2460 SoC can dynamically scale its clock-speeds and also supports the new Smart Idle technology (SIT) which enables it to switch off while the operating systems remains in the "on" state (S0); the technique takes full advantage of clock and distributed power gating across power islands and can instantly resume from idle states thanks to L2 cache peculiarities. The new chip is in production now using 32nm process technology.