The gates have been lifted and CES2012 is finally underway in Las Vegas. Tens of thousands of press and tech enthusiasts have taken to the show floor to see what companies have to show off this year.

Those who’ve stopped by Intel’s booth were treated to a new smartphone reference design that was much improved over their previous design, which looked remarkably similar to an iPhone. The device at Intel’s booth is running on their Atom Z2460 processor, a single-core chipset clocked at 1.6GHz. Intel’s reference design is running a stock version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread and also features an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator, 4-inch display, NFC capability, an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera.

The reference design is not marketed directly to consumers; rather, it serves as a reference model for handset makers such as Motorola, HTC and Samsung to use to develop their own smartphones based on Intel’s processors instead of the usual ARM suspects. Intel is attempting to make its way into the smartphone market and aims to convince a few of the big players to develop devices with Intel’s innards.

We’ll stop by the booth a bit later and ask if they’ll let us run a few benchmarks to see how their concept phone compares to the current crop of devices. Previous tests indicate that Intel could give even Tegra 3 a run for its money. Meanwhile, let us know what you think about the reference design phone and/or about Intel’s move into Android.