A media report suggests that Taiwan-based vendors will ship Intel Atom “Medfield” powered devices in the third quarter this year. The release timeframe of the code-named Medfield system-on-chip (SoC) seems to be ahead of schedule.

The first products based on Intel Atom “Medfield” SoC will be demonstrated at Computex Taipei 2011 trade-show, according to a news-story at DigiTimes web-site. Actual products based on Medfield system-on-chip, which is specifically designed for ultra low-power devices, will be released already in the third quarter, which is earlier than the market has expected so far. Unfortunately, it is unclear what kind of devices featuring Medfield will be released.

Even though Intel Corp. officially promised last year that premium handsets featuring Atom “Medfield” system-on-chip will be available in the second half of 2011, but Nokia’s decision to transit to Windows Phone 7 platform and thus redesign its roadmap fully, the future of Medfield in smartphones became uncertain. The new report does not indicate that there will be x86 smartphones released this year.

"[Medfield] is [designed for] phones to be shipped later in 2011 and 2012. You will see smartphones from premier market vendors with Intel silicon inside in the second half of next year. Getting chips for phone is a hard work, but it is not the main work. The biggest amount of the work has to do with the modem integration, the telephony stack, the protocol stack that you need, network certification and so forth. We are deep into that with our first-generation silicon for smartphones,” explained Paul Otellini, chief executive officer of Intel, at an investor conference.

Intel Medfield will have to compete against an array of ARM-based SoCs, including Nvidia Tegra 3, Qualcomm Snapdragon and so on.

Tags: Intel, Medfield, Tegra, Snapdragon