For some time now Intel had been trying to enter the smartphone sector owing to the success when it comes to pc’s, and they have finally managed to do it with the introduction of the new Lenovo K800,the first smartphone to hit the market running Intel’s 32nm Medfield platform.
The K800 is based on the Penwell SoC that has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 CPU with 512KB L2 cache. On the GPU side it comes with PowerVR SGX 540 which has been clocked at a even higher than usual 400MHz and dual-channel LPDDR2 memory. The CPU in Penwell is only a single-core right now but Intel is expected to come up with dual-core versions later, along with a faster GPU.
The really important question here is how good is this when it comes to performance and the answer is ‘pretty good’ . Despite the single-core CPU and the fact that the K800 was running on Gingerbread, the Intel chip managed to race past phones like the Galaxy Nexus running ICS and the iPhone 4S in the browser benchmarks. But the GPU ratings were not that impressive, although it is powerful enough to decode and encode 1080p30 video. Even in terms of power conception, Intel says it’s got the better of phones like the iPhone 4S, Galaxy S II, HTC Sensation and the LG Optimus 2x.
Well Intel seems to have started well after it is erady to partner Lenovo and Motorolla but we must also consider how well it will fare against the Cortex A15 and the Qualcomm Krait when they release later this year.