Intel announced at the Mobile World Congress more partners for its mobile products. Orange, ZTE and India's Lava International will develop mobile devices using Intel's Atom chips, adding to earlier agreements with Lenovo and Motorola. ZTE's first phone using Intel architecture is expected to launch in the second half of this year. Intel is also working with Visa on developing mobile commerce applications. In addition, Intel announced plans for three new smartphone SoC. Extending the performance and energy efficiency of the Atom processor Z2460, formerly codenamed Medfield, Intel announced that the platform will now support speeds up to 2GHz. Intel also announced the Atom Z2580 processor, that doubles the performance of the Z2460 and supports multimode LTE/3G/2G. Intel will sample the Z2580 in the second half of the year with customer products scheduled in the first half of 2013. For low-cost handsets in emerging markets, Intel disclosed plans for the Atom processor Z2000. The platform includes a 1.0 GHz Atom CPU with support for the Intel XMM 6265 3G HSPA+ modem with dual-SIM, 2G/3G and the Android OS. Intel will sample the Z2000 in mid-2012 with customer products scheduled by early 2013. Intel said development of the Atom processor will outpace Moore's Law, with the company planning to ship 22nm SoCs for carrier certification next year and already developing 14nm SoC technology. In 2011, Intel shipped more than 400 million cellular platforms. It's latest is the XMM 7160, a multimode LTE/3G/2G platform with support for 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink as well as HSPA+ 42Mbps. Intel will sample the product in the second quarter with customer designs scheduled to launch by the end of 2012. Intel also announced that it is sampling the XMM 6360 platform, a new slim modem for HSPA+ up to 42Mbps for small form factors.
