In a follow up to their Medfield processor unveiled at CES a few weeks ago, Intel on Monday announced two new Atom chips to its mobile phone chip line-up during the company’s Mobile World Congress press event  in Barcelona.

The Atom Z series, which was unveiled at CES 2012, previously only featured the  Z2460  “Medfield” processor. That was a single-core chip based on the 32nm Penwell architecture famous for powering phones, tablets, low-cost PCs, netbooks and nettops.During this year’s Mobile World Congress, we watched as Orange unveiled the Santa Clara, the first device to sport Intel’s 2GHz  Z2460 “Medfield” processor. The silicon giant has now added two more chips to its line-up, the dual-core Atom Z2580 and a low-cost Z2000.

The Atom Z2580 CPU features two cores (the same Medfield design),and will be equally fast with an Intel Xmm 7160 model, LTE and faster HSPA+ capabilities.

 The company will begin testing both chipsets in the second half of 2012. However, consumer products are unlikely to happen before the first half of 2013 at the earliest .

Assuming all goes to plan on the regulatory side. EE says it’s held successful trials of LTE on 800MHz in rural Cornwall, and that a new 1800MHz trial is due in April. Bristol will be the first to get 1800MHz LTE from the carriers.The service will be available via Orange and T-Mobile, as well as Virgin, which runs on EE’s networks.

Kazuo Hirai, who currently runs Sony’s consumer products division, will promoted to president and CEO from April, replacing Howard Stringer, who ran the company for seven years.