Nokia + Intel : What It Means To The Mobile Industry

Yesterday, two of the biggest and most feared technology companies in the world have announced that they would be working more closely to build mobile device platforms and architectures.

The press release posted yesterday does not mention mobile phones at all but this doesn't mean that the two companies won't be considering this option. It is not the first time that Intel is dabbling in the world of mobile hardware.

Intel inherited the StrongARM family from DEC back in 1997 which Intel used to replace its RISC processor range. It morphed into the XScale family before Intel off-loaded it in June 2006 to Marvel Technology group for $600 million to concentrate solely on the x86 family.

Xscale processors have been used in a number of popular handheld products like RIM's Blackberry, Palm handlsets, the Amazon Kindle, the Dell Axim range of personal digital assistants and much more. So why would Intel come back to a market it apparently left three years ago when it sold XScale to MTG?

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Two reasons could explain this. Firstly, the decision coincide with the formidable rise of the "Core" generation of processors. Intel might have envisaged that one day, Core-based products might achieve the same performance/power consumption ratio that ARM processors do. 

Then in October 2007, Intel announced that it was developing the technology that was going to give rise to the Atom family, which is widely used in Netbooks.