With the surge of tablets that are coming or will be coming to the market, Intel is not one to be left behind. Company CEO Paul Otellini says, “We believe that like netbooks, tablets will expand the term for computing overall with a new form factor and new uses that bring computing to even more aspects of our lives.” The company is optimistic that that it could profit from the rising product segment in the market, noting that it doesn’t see cannibalization of the traditional PC space as an issue. Intel compares tablets to the fear that many had when netbooks emerged, that netbooks may kill off the PC industry. Otellini notes, “We saw the same thing happen when netbooks were introduced, but three years later, both the PC and the netbook market segments have grown substantially and we believe that will happen again with tablets.”
The company is looking broadly to all mobile operating systems, and seems to be platform agnostic in delivering its chip solutions. “Our design win momentum is very strong, and in the coming months and quarters, you will see Intel solutions that run on Windows, Android and MeeGo operating systems across a variety of form factors and price points. We fully expect to participate broadly and profitably in this category, and that in the end, the tablet category will be additive to our bottom line and not take away from it.”
Intel will face growing competition from dedicated mobile chipmakers, such as Qualcomm with its Snapdragon processors, Texas Instruments and its OMAP processors, and NVIDIA and the Tegra 2 processor in the tablet space. After having sold off its mobile chip business based on ARM technology to Marvell, Intel hasn’t really made strides in the smartphone race. With the tablet market, Intel could better leverage its Atom-based mobile processor, which could deliver more using less power in mobile devices. The company is optimistic in its work with all of the platforms. “We are the only architecture that runs all of the major-all but one of the major tablet operating systems, we don’t yet run on Apple,” Otellini says. “So I think we’re in a pretty good space.”
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