Industry leaders in the computer chipmaker market are trading places as Intel pushes into mobile devices and Qualcomm aims to break into PCs.
As tablet makers get set to launch new Windows 8 platform devices, Intel is looking to get some traction in the Android mobile market that is currently dominated by Qualcom and ARM processor makers.
Overnight it was announced that Intel and Google have teamed up to optimise future Android releases for Intel’s low-power Atom processors for mobile devices in a bid to boost Intel’s business in the smartphone race.
“The unprecedented demand for computing from the client devices to the cloud is creating significant opportunity for the industry,” said Intel chief Paul Otellini at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
“Intel is innovating and working with our partners to deliver computing experiences that are more mobile, secure and seamless.”
The company is also working on a new class of platform power management for the slimline laptops known as Ultrabooks, with Acer, Asus and Toshiba recently jumping into the market with Intel-run Ultrabooks.
The platform will be given a leg-up in 2012 with the release of Intel’s ‘Ivy Bridge’ chips which are slated for release in the first half of 2012. The upcoming chips will essentially be improved and shrunken Sandy Bridge chips with better power management.
According to Otellini, the industry is set to see connected standby battery life on mobile products push up to 10 days by 2013 for ‘always-on-always-connected’ computing
Meanwhile, the largest smartphone chipmaker, Qualcomm, is jumping onto Microsoft’s Windows 8 announcement to push into the PC market.
The upcoming Windows 8 operating system is set to be released for mobile devices like tablets as well as PCs and will run on mobile chips like those from Qualcomm.
The software giant is working with companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm which make chips based on the ARM architecture seen across mobile processors to engineer the software to function properly across devices.
Intel is also set to show Windows 8 running on its own products.
