Intel, which has made slow progress to date in tablet devices, pointed on Wednesday to a pickup in 2011 with 35 design wins with manufacturers.
But the world’s biggest chipmaker continues to struggle to break into smartphones, with Paul Otellini, chief executive, telling Barclays Capital’s Global Technology Conference in San Francisco that its first would not appear until the second half of next year.
Mr Otellini said the phone game represented a marathon not a sprint for Intel. It was tackling issues of certification, modem integration and the telecoms software stack. Its smartphone processor codenamed Medfield was currently being debugged for shipment in 2011 and 2012, he added.
Medfield is the successor to the Moorestown chip, launched in May, which still does not match the low-power capabilities of Arm-based phone processors and has not appeared in any smartphones this year, despite Intel’s high hopes expressed at the CES show in January.
Smartphones with Intel silicon inside them would now appear in the second half of 2011, said Mr Otellini.
On tablets, the chief executive said Intel now had 35 design wins, meaning manufacturers were including its Atom processors and chipsets in 35 different products. He said these were based on Windows, its own Meego operating system and Android, including the forthcoming Honeycomb version adapted for tablets.
Consumer products would appear in the first half of next year, he said, with its Moorestown processor appearing in the thinnest and lightest tablets and the higher performance “Oak Trail” Atom processor destined for Windows-based tablets.
“Our customers are designing to support multiple operating systems – no one knows who is going to win here,” he said.
