Intel is predicting a reinvention over the next two years of the consumer PC – a core market for the world’s biggest chipmaker – as it battles competition from smartphones and tablets.
Speaking at the company’s analyst meeting on Tuesday, Paul Otellini, chief executive, said that the PC would become a higher performance mainstream-priced, touch-enabled device that would not compromise on features such as thinness, instant-on capabilities, permanent internet connectivity and all-day battery life.
“This is not just about evolving, this is about reinventing the PC, making it more of a consumer electronics-like device,” he said.
In front of a slide showing a laptop resembling a MacBook Air, Mr Otellini spelt out a vision similar to that of his Apple counterpart Steve Jobs on the future of computing, although he recognised a significant contribution from longtime partner Microsoft.
“I believe when you see these kinds of devices, maybe up to Windows 8, 9 and beyond, these will really be the best in class for these kinds of products.”
Mr Otellini had little progress to report in tablets and smartphones, where Intel has lagged its rivals.
He said the company was on track on tablets in terms of keeping up with forecasts made in December when it said 35 products featuring its Atom chips were coming. The first tablets were running Windows, with Android and ones running Meego – the operating system Intel developed with Nokia – on the way.
“The tablet race is nowhere near finished and no one knows the size of this market,” he said.
Mr Otellini said Intel had an intense focus on smartphones under a new but experienced management team (joint managers were appointed after the head of the Ultra Mobility group, Anand Chandrasekher resigned abruptly in March) .
However, he admitted disappointment at Nokia’s decision to side with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 smartphone software rather than Meego and reiterated management predictions that the first Intel-based smartphones would not appear until the first half of 2012.
“Intel will be very successful here over time,” he insisted.
Intel has suffered in comparison to the lower power requirements of microprocessors based on designs of the UK’s Arm, which are dominant in smartphones and tablets.
In an apparent response to this, Mr Otellini announced Intel was resetting its roadmap according to a new power criteria that represented a fundamental shift for its design process.
“We are aiming our centre point for all our design activities [down] from the 35-40 watt midpoint we have today for notebooks that most of us use, we are shifting that down substantially to 15 watts,” he said.
Designs for the power range of its low-power atom processors would be expanded to touch this centre point as well.
This would allow Intel designs and software to “scale from the milliwatt to the megawatt up in the data center, I don’t think anyone else on earth is even thinking about this and this will be implemented over the next several years.”
The company will also use its superior manufacturing processes to accelerate new generations of chips at twice the rate of Moore’s Law, which predicts new generations around every two years. Instead, over the next three years, Intel’s Atom processors would move from Saltwell-codenamed chips at circuit widths of 32 billionths of a metre, to Silvermont ones at 22 nanometres and then Airmont at 14nm.
In a question-and-answer session, an analyst suggested a “blasphemous” alternative strategy where Intel could just start making Arm-based chips.
Mr Otellini categorically ruled this out for a company that has the best margins in the chip industry.
“The important thing is to figure out how to get paid and how to be present [in a market],” he said.
“The best way in these new markets is to build best-in-class chips…there’s no advantage of going in there, we’d be beholden to Arm and pay royalties to them so we would have lower profits.”
