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At CES 2012, Intel has officially launched Medfield — the Atom Z2460 — a smartphone SoC that’s going into products that will actually ship. That last is particularly important — unlike past launches, Intel has held Medfield back until its partners were ready to go to press as well. Motorola has announced a multi-stage deal involving both phones and tablets, with phones coming first and expected by this summer, while Lenovo demoed its K800 smartphone (intended for the Chinese market) from stage this afternoon.

Even so, today’s news is likely to be greeted by some skepticism; Intel, after all, has sung this song before. Moorestown launched two years ago with an LG GW990 phone on display, demonstrations of Intel’s then-new OS, Moblin, and plenty of chest beating over the chip’s capabilities. It promptly sank. The next two years poured on the insults — Nokia abandoned the MeeGo project, Anand Chandrasekher resigned from his position as general manager of Intel’s mobile division, and the company reorganized its entire mobile structure just last month.

When Intel invited us to a private briefing several weeks ago, we were initially dubious as to whether Medfield was the chip that would begin to turn the company’s mobile fortunes around. Based on what we’ve seen, we think it will. Our meeting with Intel was long on engineers and short on marketing; top mobile engineer Mike Bell was on hand to field questions and discuss Intel’s uphill struggle in this market.

Forget Moorestown. Forget the pundits who’ve claimed that Intel was incapable of developing a truly low-power processor. Medfield hits “reset” on what’s come before.

Why it’s different this time around

First, there’s the matter of the chip itself. When Intel started showing off Moorestown prototypes, it initially opted for a form-factor only the X-Men’s Cyclops would have wanted. The company’s launch vehicles were a pair of unreleased devices from LG and Aava (who?). No major carriers or other top manufacturers had committed to build phones.

Today, Medfield is launching with support on both fronts. Lenovo and Motorola have announced products, and we expect to hear more news from other companies at Mobile World Congress next month. The chip is much smaller; the smartphones we spent time with last month are the same size, shape, and weight as the ARM-powered products they’ll compete against. Intel’s goal, in fact, isn’t to blow everything else out of the water, but to field a competitive design that can slug it out with existing smartphones from HTC, Samsung, and Motorola.

The fact that manufacturers are willing to commit up front makes an enormous difference, but it’s not the only one. This time around, Intel isn’t stuck trying to push an entire OS simultaneously. By backing and contributing to Android, Intel has reaped the benefit of Google’s operating system without having to persuade handset manufacturers and carriers to create x86-specific software from the ground up.

Quick — pick out the Medfield phone

Another major change from Moorestown to Medfield is the number of additional chips required to power the device. Moorestown was technically a two-chip solution (Lincroft + Langwell), but it relied on a third chip — Brierstown — for power management. Manufacturers also had to add a Power Management IC (PMIC), a WiFi/3G radio, and external DRAM, bringing the minimum number of discrete chips to five.

Medfield integrates the functions originally contained within Langwell and incorporates DRAM via Intel’s first use of package-on-package bonding. This brings the total necessary chips down to three — Medfield, its radio, and PMIC.

Of course none of this matters if the Atom-based processor isn’t competitive with current and future ARM-based hardware.

Next page: Hardware specifications