Intel tries its hand at smartphone processors again

Computer processor maker Intel has unveiled new chips which the company is hoping will help it break into the lucrative smartphone market.

While Intel is huge in the PC market, so far the company has had little success with handsets, despite a couple of abortive attempts to push its way into the smartphone arena. Intel, meanwhile, says it just hadn't really tried with smartphones, until now.

The second generation of Atom processors are expected to appear later this year, with Intel making claims of having achieved the holy grail of smartphone chips - low power usage. The company is quoting a battery life of ten days standby, two days of audio, and six hours of 3G talk time; all calculated, it reckons, on a typical 'real-life' smartphone platform.

Speaking to reporters, Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, addressed the suggestion that Intel has failed before and is now attempting to join the market too late. "There does appear to be some confusion which has been fueled a bit by our competitors," he said. "They tend to like to take our netbook product line and compare it to their smartphone product line, and it's amusing because we've never really said that we had a smartphone offering until today."

And moving on to the need to create ultra-low-power chips for the smartphone market he went on "Breaking that power barrier on Intel architecture is just something that Intel had not put its mind to. We did not focus on that. We were focused on other aspects of our business", adding "But when we focused our mind on it, we delivered. In style."

However, whatever Intel may be claiming about its product, the fact remains that it is a latecomer to a market which ARM already has pretty much sewn up; and persuading manufacturers to switch horse mid-race, as it were, is going to be a tough sell.