Samsung may launch an Android smartphone powered by Intel's Atom Moorefield

According to Korean website DDaily, Samsung could introduce an Intel Atom-powered smartphone later this year. The publication notes that the world’s largest phone maker has already started developing a handset that uses one of Intel’s latest chipsets, namely the Intel Atom Z3500 (also known as Moorefield).

Moorefield was announced by Intel at MWC 2014 in February, supports the 64-bit architecture, and has four cores clocked at up to 2.3GHz. However, DDaily reports that Samsung will not allow the CPU cores to run at over 1.7GHz - in order to limit power consumption, and to prevent eventual overheating issues. It’s said that the Moorefield-based Samsung smartphone won’t be a high-end one. It will obviously run Android - and that’s all we know about it for now.

Interestingly, the Korean website says that, to persuade Samsung into buying its chipsets, Intel lowered the price of a unit to just $7 (which is near the production cost). Usually, a “premium” applications processor costs more than $20.

Samsung is known for relying on smartphone processors from Qualcomm, or from its own Semiconductor division (which makes Exynos chipsets). We didn’t expect to hear that it may soon launch an Intel-powered handset, though that low price is enough for the company to justify such a surprising move.