Intel Corp. said at the unveiling of the of the research and development lab with Nokia that its next-generation ultra-mobile platform known as Medfield will be less power hungry that ARM architecture-based system-on-chips from companies like Qualcomm. The generation after Medfield will offer both lower power consumption and much higher performance than ARM-based solutions.

"With Moorestown processor we equal them on standby power, in the next generation Medfield we will equal them on active power," said Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, in an interview with Reuters news-agency.

Intel's processors have substantial performance advantages over ARM-based solutions already. Nonetheless, Intel's x86 platforms for handheld products still consume too much power to be utilized inside smartphones. Intel's current Moorestown has no actual design wins with smartphone manufacturers, but the ultra-mobile platform can be featured inside low-power tablets. Despite of the lack of any success in smartphones so far, Intel believes that with Medfield it will register design wins and after that will be able to offer both lower power consumption and greater performance than ARM-powered SoCs.

"I expect us to just pull away after that because we have a fundamental technology advantage, which they don't have," stressed Mr. Rattner.

According to Nokia, long batter life is the most important quality of mobile phones. Given the fact that it works with Intel to create MeeGo operating system as well as has licensed the world's largest chipmaker its baseband technology, it looks like the biggest manufacturer of mobile phones actually believes in Intel's promises to significantly reduce power consumption of x86 microprocessors while retaining their high performance.

Tags: Intel, Medfield, Moorestown