Intel Intros The Atom Z2420 Lexington Mobile Processor Aimed At Emerging Markets

Intel is ready to chip away at Qualcomm’s dominance in the smartphone arena. Today at the company’s CES Press conference, the company introduced the Atom Z2420 mobile processor, codenamed Lexington, which is aimed at the emerging market demographics including India, Latin America, and Africa.

The chip has been leaked before, but it’s finally coming to market and will be available in smartphones by Acer, Lava, and Safaricom with full support for Android apps.

Mike Bell, GM of Mobile products at Intel, focused heavily on the chip’s imaging capabilities. With Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology, a clock speed of 1.2GHz and support for HSPA+ speeds, the Z2420 can offer 1080p hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding, as well as support for two cameras.

In fact, at a 5-megapixel level, the chip is capable of taking seven pictures in a single second.

But Intel isn’t only focused on imaging in smartphones, as crucial as it may be. The Z2420 chip and Lexington platform also supports Dual Sim/Dual Standby technology. This means that users can not only swap out sim cads based on their location and the best possible carrier options, but that those dual sim cards can actually remain within the device itself, and simply be toggled on and off.

A few other features clearly aimed at emerging markets include the ability to wirelessly share the display with larger WiFi-enabled devices like a TV or computer monitor, FM radio, as well as microSD expansion support.

But perhaps the most important characteristic of the Atom Z2420 platform is it’s frugality with battery consumption. According to Mr. Bell, the chip has about 18 percent better power consumption than Qualcomm’s offerings.