Even though they haven't delivered a single unit yet, Intel has made a bold claim that their first Atom-based smartphone processor will outperform the best processors offered by ARM by a large margin.
The claim was made by Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, during his session at the Mobile World Conference 2011 in Barcelona, Spain.
According to Anand, Intel's upcoming smartphone - codenamed "Medfield" - will have standby time similar to ARM cores' but it will "blow away" them in terms of processing speed and active time.
Intel's first smartphone CPU chips are scheduled for release late this year and they will include a built-in HSPA+ modem, thanks to the technology Intel acquired from its $1.4B USD purchase of Infineon.
The most important problem facing Intel right now is that it would be impossible to convince hardware manufacturers to embrace the new chip if the performance difference isn't as earth shattering as Intel claims.
Outperforming ARM's chips in terms of performance and power efficiency is crucial for Intel now since ARM has already announced a quad-core 2.5 GHz ARM chip that will be available next year and will be able to run Windows 8.