Intel will ship its Oak Trail chipsets in tablets running the Honeycomb version of Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform, giving more definition to the company's plans to take on ARM Holdings in the mobile market.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during the company's first-quarter earnings conference call that Intel is making sure its chips run on tablets based on Honeycomb, MeeGo and Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows. "We're heads down on a number of designs on tablets, on all three of those operating systems," Otellini said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.
With regard to Honeycomb specifically, Otellini said Intel has received the source-code and is "actively doing the port on that and expect to be able to ramp those machines over the course of this year for a number of customers."
Intel has vowed to make a splash this year in tablets and smartphones to counter the dominance of chipset makers using architecture from ARM--those vendors include Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), Nvidia, Samsung and Texas Instruments. However, Intel's ambitions took a hit when Nokia (NYSE:NOK) shifted emphasis away from MeeGo, which it had jointly developed with Intel, to focus on Windows Phone 7.
"In terms of phones, obviously, we lost Nokia, which took a lot of wind out of the sales for phones this year," Otellini said. "We've redirected those resources onto a number of other major accounts, focusing on carriers who want their own devices and also on handset manufacturers."
The Intel chief added that "the limit in terms of them getting to market is going to be the interoperability testing of the networks at this point in time. So I think I would be very disappointed if you didn't see Intel-based phones for sale 12 months from now."
Meanwhile, ARM has indicated that smartphones and tablets using its upcoming Cortex-A15 processor will be available starting late 2012 or early 2013, according to IDG News Service. The company unveiled the new core, dubbed "Eagle," in September. The Cortex-A15 can run at speeds of up to 2.5 GHz.
For more:
- see this MarketWatch article
- see this Seeking Alpha transcript
- see this IDG News Service article
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