Intel Merrifield Reference Phone Shows Platform's Potential

Intel Merrifield Reference Phone Shows Platform's Potential

This week, Intel turned heads when it announced its new Intel Atom Z3400 “Merrifield” platform for mobile. Targeted at smartphones and some tablets, the new dual-core SoCs promise performance that’s on a par with, or better than, leading mobile chips from Qualcomm and Apple. While we’re not able to test a production-level Merrifield-powered phone just yet, we did have the opportunity to spend a few moments with an Intel Reference Design Phone with the 2.13-GHz Atom Z3480 chip and we got to go over some of Intel’s internal test results.

The phone we handled had a 4.5-inch, 720p display, 2GB of RAM and the aforementioned Atom Z3480 Merrifield SoC,along with Intel’s XMM 7160 modem. The phone had a rather bland square shiny black body rimmed with boring white-plastic sides with a 13-MP camera on the back and a 2-MP shooter facing front. It ran a very stock version of Android Jellybean, without any special skins or even the special camera software necessary to shoot with both lenses at once, a feature of Merrifield that we’ve also seen on a number of ARM-powered phones from Samsung and LG.
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