Intel and Google on Tuesday announced a partnership to enable the world's largest chip maker's architecture on the search giant's products, saying that an Intel chip-based Android smartphone will hit the market in the first half of 2012.
In a joint press release, the two companies said the future versions of Android mobile operating system will support Intel's low power Atom processors, in addition to other architectures.
At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini said the Intel smartphone chip is code-named Medfield and based on the company's own PC- based computer architecture.
Otellini said multiple vendors around the world will launch the Medfield-based Android smartphones in the first half of 2012.
Andy Rubin, senior vice president of mobile at Google, came on stage at the close of Otellini's keynote to hail the joint initiatives between the two companies.
Intel has been struggling to get a bite of the booming market of smartphones and tablets. Most of the current mobile devices use chips based on architecture from ARM Holdings, which are considered more power efficient than Intel's products. Nokia had planned to ship smartphones with Intel chips this year, but it shifted to ARM-based phones with Windows Phone 7 system.
Otellini said Intel will eventually have an advantage in supplying smartphone chips as the business is not established in terms of the final winner and performance of the products keeps growing.