Intel has launched new dual-core Atom Z3480 Merrifield and quad-core Atom Z3580 Moorefield chips, claiming the technology will surpass Apple’s A7 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 processors.
Both the 64-bit compatible chipsets are aimed at Android smartphones and tablets and replace the vendor’s Clover Trail+ technology as its flagship mobile platform.
Merrifield, according to Intel, will now be known as the Intel Atom processor Z3480. The SoC is based on Intel’s 22nm Silvermont micro architecture, clocks at 2.13GHz, and provides “improved” battery life.
It also includes a “next generation” image signal processor as well as a dedicated programmable video signal processor that can encode and decode videos at 1080p.
The vendor claimed that Merrifield outperformed Apple’s A7 CPU and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 CPU on a number of benchmarks, including WebXPRT 2013 and MobileXPRT 2013 while providing longer battery life than its competitors.
Meanwhile, Moorefield , the Z3580, beefs up with two extra cores, and pushes the clock to 2.3GHz. It also adds support for 800MHz LDPDDR3 memory.
The new chipsets also feature a suite of low power sensors, which allow them to deliver contextual information to apps with motion and gesture, audio and location sensing as well as contextual analyses, without excessively draining device batteries.
In addition to its two processor platforms, the vendor announced a couple of standalone LTE modems in the XMM 7160, The new modem supports LTE-Advanced capabilities including 23 combinations of carrier aggregation, category six speeds and support for TDD LTE and TD-SCDMA.
The chipset manufacturer, who is a late entrant to the smartphone chipset market, has been under pressure to perform in the mobile market after falling laptop sales.
The mobile market is currently dominated by Qualcomm, Research firm Strategy Analytics says Qualcomm has increased its market share to 54 percent thanks to its LTE-integrated Snapdragon chips.
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