When it comes to Smartphones and Tablets things are not looking good at Intel especially as consumers are dumping Atom based netbooks for Tablets powered by none processors from Intel competitors.Now the company, who recently had problems with their Sandy Bridge processor for notebooks, has had to go back to the drawing boards in an effort to catch up.
According to the Financial Times, Intel’s Moorestown-codenamed Atom chip has turned out to be a lost generation on smartphones for the world’s biggest chipmaker, with handset makers completely shunning the processor and the company.
Paul Otellini, Intel chief executive, admits that their mobile future now depends on its Medfield-codenamed chip.
Stacy Smith, chief financial officer, at Goldman Sachs gave a graphic demonstration of why Moorestown has flopped during his keynote at a Goldman conference this week – holding up the Moorestown product next to the new Medfield one, he impressed in showing how Medfield was a quarter of its size, while inadvertently making it clear that Moorestown was a clunker in taking up too much space and consuming far too much power for a smartphone.
Intel announced in Barcelona that samples of Medfield were now being produced ahead of full production later this year, while Mr Otellini said we should expect smartphones using it in the second half.
Mr Smith was more specific and less optimistic – saying consumers should be able to buy Medfield-based phones around the end of this year or early in 2012.
That is all a year later than intended – an LG smartphone featuring a Moorestown chip was shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2010, but failed to appear as expected in the second half of the year.
Mr Smith said Intel had learned valuable lessons from LG and others failing to follow through their initial interest in Moorestown, officially launched with some fanfare in May last year.
“First and foremost, you have got to hit the power envelope. With Moorestown, we were right at the edge of what fits into a mobile phone as opposed to Medfield where we are right at the heart,” he said.
