Those developments were by Intel CEO Paul Otellini and 's Senior Vice President of Mobile Andy Rubin, who appeared onstage together at the Intel Developer Forum.

But to analysts, the latest Intel-Google partnership wasn't all that significant, since Atom-based have been promised and delayed many times in recent years.

"Most of us didn't see what the big announcement [with Google and Intel] was," said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner. He noted that Intel's Medfield chip, based on Atom, "was always going to support Android and also MeeGo and Windows, so what's the news?"

It would almost seem that Intel's difficulty in producing smartphone chips would be a deterrent to Google's working with Intel, since Google's Android operating system already runs on the largest share of smartphone's globally, some analysts said.

Dulaney added that the "onstage presence of Rubin [at an Intel event] seemed weird because there wasn't any real meat to the announcement."