Intel Invests in Android as Mobile Strategy Emerges
Insyde, a Taiwan-based company that makes firmware based on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Android distributions based on the original open-source code Google produces, received some fresh capital this week. Intel Capital made an investment of NT$300 million in the company, the equivalent of about $10 million, marking the latest result of the long partnership between the two.
“We are pleased to receive this new investment from Intel,” said Jeremy Wang, Insyde Software’s chairman and CEO. “Insyde Software is not only a trusted provider of robust, quick-booting UEFI BIOS firmware for Intel platforms but also an experienced Android system integrator that can successfully bring highly-tuned, product-quality system software to our customers.”
Insyde is currently in collaboration with Intel on developing Android initiatives. The latter has set its eyes on establishing a foothold in the mobile market with its thin and portable Ultrabooks, among other products. Intel doesn’t have much of a presence in this space, and their competitors are already gnawing away at the chipmaker’s market share in other areas. AMD’s recent launch of the 16-core Opteron chip line and the amount of early support it received from HP, Dell, VMware and other major players is one of the more significant examples of that.
Android has been a particular focus for Intel as well. Extreme Tech managed to round-up all of the company’s contributions to the open-source mobile OS, which seem to extend far beyond x86 optimization for Ice Cream Sandwitch (4.0). The chipmaker released a total of about 120 Android patches, which include contributions to the addition of hardware virtualization support for Android emulation on Windows and Mac. On top of that, Intel has an on-going partnership with Google to optimize Android-powered devices for the former’s chips; the first results of the collaboration will be unveiled sometime in early 2012.
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