Intel Corp. is entering the smartphone battle with new smartphones developed with partners Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Lenovo Group.

At the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini announced that the chipmaker had entered a multi-year partnership with Motorola in which Motorola will develop smartphones using Intel's Atom chips. The partnership will also cover tablets as well as smartphones with Motorola delivering the first Intel powered smartphones later this year.

"We will have devices and carrier validation this summer," said Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, at the Intel CES keynote. The first Intel Motorola phones will be launched soon after.

Intel also announced another partnership with Lenovo Group. The Chinese PC maker will be entering the smartphone market with a new device based on Intel's Atom processor. Liu Jun, president of Lenovo's company's mobile Internet and digital home group, demonstrated the first Lenovo phone with Intel's x86 chip: the Lenovo K800 smartphone. The K800 has a 4.5 inch screen with 720p video resolution, running on the Lenovo LeOS user interface and powered by the 1.66 Ghz Atom Z2460 chip. Lenovo will launch the K800 in China in the second quarter of the year.

Intel's concentrated effort to bring its x86 chips to smartphones represents the growing importance of smartphones and tablets to the industry. As traditional PC sales dwindle, Intel faces a future where the company faces dwindling profits and ARM chips that power tablets and smartphones gain dominance. Intel's entrance in the mobile phone market, and its efforts with the ultrabook line of computers, could determine if the Silicon Valley giant could still remain relevant in the years to come.

While Intel's next version of its Atom chips, code-named Medfield has some impressive specs, it still remains to be seen whether the chip would be a credible competitor to ARM's chips. Intel claimed that its single core, 1.6 Ghz Medfield processors offered better performance and lower power consumption than ARM processors. Intel also assured developers that Android apps will run on x86 Android phones.

But what could really put a dent in ARM's dominance of the smartphone market is the power efficiency of its chips. As Intel gets into manufacturing more chips for smartphones, the speed and power efficiency of the Medfield processors could only improve over time. We could be seeing a repeat of the Intel-AMD wars that took over the PC processor market.