The chip is based around Intel's Atom-based Airmont processor cores and it was made by Chipzilla using its 14-nanometer chip manufacturing technology.

Spreadtrum said the chip will go into mass production in the second quarter of 2017 which means we should see it in the shops in the second half of 2017.

One thing should be noted is that Intel is not involved in the branding at all. Spreadtrum is pitching it as being made by the Intel Custom Foundry (ICF) but other than that its name is off it.

Spreadtrum claims the Airmont CPU core inside the SC9861G-IA runs at 2GHz and it is unlikely to beat the Snapdragon 652 in per-core performance. Running on x86 make it less useful as a rival to ARM based chips. Intel’s mobile chips were not as bad as was claimed by the armies of Android fans, but it was not as robust, which is one of the reasons we suspect Intel pulled the plug on it.

There can be only one reason why a smartphone maker would opt for this chip and that is that it is considerably cheaper than the rivals.