According to early benchmarks, Intel’s new Medfield mobile platform could be a very serious contender in the phone market.

The new CPU managed to outpace Google’s flagship Galaxy Nexus, powered by a dual-core TI OMAP chip. It also ends up faster than Apple’s A5 and comes in a very close second to the Asus Transformer Prime, powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core.

Bear in mind that Intel’s Atom Z2640 is a single core 1.4GHz processor, but it still manages to beat dual-core ARMs and come very close to the only Cortex A9-based quad-core.

Of course it is still too early to draw too many conclusions from the results. The benches were done on an unreleased Mefield phone running Android 2.3.7 with 1GB of memory.

More here.