Landmark deals give Intel its first opportunity to crack the mobile market.
Motorola and Intel confirmed at CES that they are entering into a multi-year, multi-device strategic relationship that includes smartphones and tablets, which Motorola will begin shipping later this year.
These Android devices will use Intel Atom processors, and specifically the Medfield chip that has been designed with mobile in mind.
Meanwhile Lenovo will launch the Intel-powered K800 in China in the second quarter of this year.
The deals represent a breakthrough for Intel, which dominates the desktop space but has watched from the sidelines as Qualcomm, TI and others have dominated the mobile sector using ARM technology.
Intel has tried and tried but at present there are no phones on the market that use its chips.
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With the smartphone market exploding and portable devices increasingly cannibalising the desktop space, the need to participate in mobile has become urgent.
Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, said: “Our long-term relationship with Motorola Mobility will help accelerate Intel architecture into new mobile market segments.
"We expect the combination of our companies to break new ground and bring the very best of computing capabilities to smartphones and tablets, which in turn will help to create powerful new experiences that connect and enrich people’s lives wherever they may be.”
The Medfield chip is based on Intel's X86-architecture central processing unit (CPU), and has been built to maximise processing while preserving battery life. It claims the chip can deliver eight hours of 3G voice calls, six hours of 1080p video decoding or five hours of 3G internet browsing.
These deals further complicate the soup of relationships in the mobile chip space. Historically Intel and Microsoft combined to dominate the PC space, but in mobile Microsoft devices are powered by ARM designs.
Meanwhile Google, one of the great rivals to Microsoft, now owns Motorola...
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