Intel upped its ante to become a major player in the smartphone business on Monday – and at the same time provided some publicity for Lenovo as well as Epic Games.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Intel announced the “Clover Tale+” mobile processor, which it hopes will help win some of the global phone market from dominant players such as Qualcomm.
To tout the processor’s speed and graphics capabilities, Intel unveiled videos of Clover Tale+ running on a Lenovo K900 smartphone (not available yet in the U.S.)
Lenovo unveiled the big (5-inch screen) “Rendevous” phone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month.
And the “app” being run in that video as well as another was Cary-based Epic Games’ “Epic Citadel,” which is the game technology firm’s first foray into Android devices. (Epic used an iOS version of Citadel to enter the Apple mobile gaming market with its Infinity Blade franchise.)
Just last week, Epic was touted at the new Sony PlayStation 4 unveiling.
At the very least, Intel’s inclusion of Epic and Lenovo shows the increasing clout the two companies are gaining in the mobile space.
As for Intel, Clover Tale+ is a high-profile effort.
Cnet notes that Clover Tale+ is a successor to a previous Intel processor known as Medfield. An analyst praised the chip as a sign that Intel is deadly serious about being a mobile player.
“They’re really making significant inroads in mobile processors,” Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin told Cnet’s Shara Tibken. “This new Clover Trail is probably the first real step toward Intel becoming a significant player in the smartphone arena.”
If that proves to be the case, Epic and Lenovo will be quite glad to go along for the ride.
