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Intel failed at mobile phone chips before, so why should this time be any different? I got a chance to put that question to Intel CFO Stacey Smith at last week’s developer forum in San Francisco.
He had two answers. One was that Intel won’t make its push into smartphones until next year, by which time its new 32 nanometer technology will be in full swing. This should push the Atom processor (which will be hitting its stride in netbooks in the second half of this year) deeper into the high-volume, low-price mobile market: each wafer will be able to produce 2,400-2,500 die, or 400-500 per cent more than the existing technology, according to Smith.
His other answer was that Intel had no competitive advantage the last time it ventured into mobile. It was, as he put it, “just another ARM merchant”.
This time, with a chip based on Intel Architecture, it has the full power of the Intel ecosystem behind it: that means being able to leverage much of the work already done by providers of applications, content and services for existing Intel technology.
Will this be enough? Discussions with handset makers are already underway, says Smith, though devices will not hit the market until the very end of 2009, or more likely early 2010. Intel needs some early design wins to show it is on the right track.
(By the way, if you doubted the importance to Intel of new mobile form-factors, from netbooks to smartphones, you only had to see one chart the company showed at the developer forum: it projected sales of 200m Atom-powered devices in 2012, compared to 300m traditional notebooks.)
David Gelles, Joseph Menn, Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in the FT's San Francisco bureau upload their views - plus tech insights from writers in New York, London and Tokyo
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