According to a new job posting on LinkedIn, Intel is hiring Windows Phone engineers in the Redmond area, potentially for some sort of x86 Windows Phone device. The news comes just several weeks after a senior product manager for Windows Phone said that their "architecture is such that it's hardware independent," implying that Windows Phone could run on Intel's x86 processors, although Microsoft has "nothing to announce at this time" in regards to Intel and Windows Phone.
The job posting appears to be hastily written, but nevertheless asks for people with Windows Phone expertise:
Windows Phone Engineers: Intel would like to talk to you. If you have Windows phone expertise, the Intel site in Redmond would like to talk to you. Please contact us at_503-544-7336. Thanks...
Intel's recent push into the smartphone market has seen several Android devices released with x86 chips inside, most notably the Motorola RAZR i with its Intel Atom Z2460 chipset. While smartphones have traditionally used ARM chipsets for processing power, Intel's x86 chips have some advantages, including faster CPU cores and greater memory bandwidth. Unfortunately as the architecture is different, apps do need to be recompiled for the chips, which as you might expect presents a significant hurdle.
Windows Phone devices currently only use Qualcomm chips, and it would be surprising to see a new device with an Intel chip inside ahead of more established ARM players such as NVIDIA with their Tegra chips, but at least more hardware manufacturers are looking to get into the Windows Phone game.
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