Intel has just revealed its latest smartphone and tablet reference platforms based on its Medfield chipset. The chip maker is dead set on grabbing a piece of the two markets under ARM's nose and obviously won't let the few unsuccessful previous attempts stop it.

Intel seems to have learned its lesson and has implemented all of Medfield's functional elements on a single chip. That's the way that all current smartphone and tablet chipsets are and it was about time Intel stopped trying to reinvent the wheel and follow suit. The so called "systems-on-a-chip" are known for their superior power efficiency, which is crucial to mobile devices.

As for the actual hardware on display, there were a couple of Android-running devices. The smartphone was powered by Gingerbread, whereas the tablet used Honeycomb. As Technology Review reported both felt really nice to use, matching the smoothness of the current Android top-dogs and iPhones.

A particularly impressive bit about the reference designs was that they were able to capture 8 megapixel images at a rate of 15 fps.

Intel's architecture VP Stephen Smith mentioned that his company expects to see the first Medfield-based market-ready devices announced in the first half of 2012, which is just around the corner.

Some CPU architecture competition should work to everyone's benefit, so we are pretty eager to see those. Knowing the current rate of mobile chipset progress, we can only imagine what will happen once a big player like Intel enters the market properly.