Intel is set to smash into the system-on-a-chip (SoC) market in 2012, where they are going to be "becoming mobile" in quite a serious way. Intel went through an internal reorganization and merged four distinctive business units into one: Mobile Communications, Mobile Wireless, Netbook & Tablet PC and Ultra-Mobility.

The new group is called "Mobile and Communications" and is lead by Mike Bell and Hermann Eul. The first product to come from the fancy new group is the 32nm chip called Medfield. Medfield is Intel's codename for their first SoC and first true highly-integrated-solution. Intel have in the past, talked of "vertically integrated platforms", without talking about how many chips were required in order to have a functional platform. This marks a new direction for Intel.

Intel's Medfield is competition against Apple's A-Series, NVIDIA's Tegra range, Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Samsung's Exynos, Texas Instruments OMAP and others. Out of the ranges just explained, Samsung's Exynos is the only SoC currently built on a 32nm process, just like Medfield.

The guts of Medfield is an x86 processing core operating at 1.6GHz, 1GB LP-DDR2 RAM, WLAN/Bluetooth/FM Radio chip, 10.1-inch screen, 1280x800 resolution and eMMC/Micro-SD card for removable storage. Benchmarks were performed on Honeycomb (Android 3.x) while the shipped products will utilize Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.x).

The guts of Medfield is an x86 processing core operating at 1.6GHz, 1GB LP-DDR2 RAM, WLAN/Bluetooth/FM Radio chip, 10.1-inch screen, 1280x800 resolution and eMMC/Micro-SD card for removable storage. Benchmarks were performed on Honeycomb (Android 3.x) while the shipped products will utilize Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.x).

When using Caffeinemark 3, Intel's Medfield 1.6GHz scored around 10,500, while NVIDIA's Tegra 2 nabbed 7,500, Qualcomm's Snapdragon MSM8260 scores 8,000 and lastly, Samsung's Exynos scores 8,500. Tegra 3 results should be available soon. But from initial testing, we can see that Intel's first foray into mobile solutions is not going to be weak.

Let's talk power consumption, the prototype version consumes 2.6W in idle, with a target of 2W. While worst-case scenarios are video playback, where watching 720p in Adobe Flash format will consume just 3.6W of power, while the target power consumption set to be 1W less at 2.6W with video playback.