On an earnings call this week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini confirmed that Intel is hard at work on an x86 port of Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb. The port is intended to be paired with the company's recently announced "Oak Trail" line of SoCs, for a platform that rumors indicate will be called "PRC Plus." Otellini didn't get specific about when the new platform would launch, noting only that products from Acer, Lenovo, and Asus will be coming in the second half of theyear.

Oak Trail will certainly outperform the ARM competition for CPU-intensive tasks, but at the cost of some battery life. It remains to be seen if and how Intel can use that performance edge to its advantage with Honeycomb. The ARM version of the Android 3.0 OS will be more polished by the time the Oak Trail products hit the market, and most of the performance-intensive stuff that we've seen from the OS so far is interface-centric. As long as the interface remains the primary place where cycles are spent, ARM could still have an advantage, because SoC makers can just pair an ARM core with a capable GPU and drive the interface that way.

Otellini also talked up the company's upcoming 32nm Medfield part, which the CEO claims will probably show up in smartphones before the end of this year.