Intel's low-power-consumption Atom series — meant for notebooks and mobile devices — debuted in May of last year. Photo courtesy of Intel
Intel’s x86 chipset is coming to Android tablets. Soon.
So says Intel CEO Paul Otellini. In the company’s first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Otellini announced that Intel had received the source code for Android version 3.0 (Honeycomb) for tablets from Google, and the company is working on porting the operating system over to the x86 architecture.
Intel “expects to be able to ramp those [Android tablet] machines over the course of this year for a number of customers,” Otellini said on a conference call with reporters. And in a separate interview with Forbes, Otellini said we may see those Intel-based tablets as early as May.
While Intel’s chips have dominated the desktop and notebook industry, the company has not had so much luck with mobile devices. Instead, ARM architecture predominates among smartphones and tablets, through ARM-based chips made by various companies including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and, most recently, Nvidia.
Part of what has kept Intel’s processors from making gains in the mobile market may be the same thing that makes it so strong in the desktop and server areas.
“The big issue is power consumption,” Richard Fichera, a semiconductor analyst from Forrester Research, told Wired.com in an interview. “ARM was designed from the beginning to be low-power consumption, while Intel’s x86 came from a whole different design perspective.”
Intel, however, has taken strides in reducing power consumption with its Atom series of processors: the 2009 Atom debut found power reduced by 20 percent from the previous generation of processors.
“Intel has radically improved their performance per watt on their server and desktop chips,” Fichera said, “but this is a threshold they need to break past to move this architecture into mobile devices.”
Last week, Intel debuted its “Oak Trail” series of Atom processors — the latest in the company’s series of low-consumption chips — though some say they don’t measure up to ARM offerings.
“Intel’s core strengths are building advanced manufacturing processes and optimizing processor architectures,” wrote Romit Shah, an analyst with Nomura Equity Research. “That said, we believe the x86 architecture is not competitive versus ARM in low power applications such as mobile handsets and tablets.”
Intel’s low-consumption Atom chips are currently implemented in notebooks, not smartphones or tablets.
Otellini also signaled Intel’s move into the smartphone space should be expected in the future. “I would be very disappointed if we didn’t see Intel-based phones for sale 12 months from now,” he said.
Some of these mobile moves has been hinted at before by Intel, with little to show for it. Last July, Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Wired.com that January of 2011 “would clearly be the window of opportunity” for the company to bring its processors to mobile devices. January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — the premier annual event for electronics industry debuts — came and went, with no sign of Intel’s processors in smartphones or tablets premiered at the show. Many of the devices introduced are using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, which is based on the ARM version seven instruction set.
“We’re not a strong player in phones yet, but we will be,” Otellini told Forbes. “We were able to bring volume economics and technology to [PC markets], and you’ll see us do the same here…drive the power down, drive performance up, drive costs down, in typical Intel fashion—boom, boom, boom.”
At last, Intel’s wish may come true. There are reports that the 
