Clash of the titans
As the eternally dominant player in the CPU space, Intel's main task historically has been to maintain its market dominance and fight the challenge of much smaller competitors like AMD in the server, desktop and notebook markets.
The chip giant realised a while ago, however, that the future is mobile, and embarked upon a low power product roadmap that yielded the hugely successful Atom processor and created the netbook category of sub-notebooks.
Popular though netbooks have been, the holy grail for Intel is the smartphone market, where the serious growth is expected to occur in years to come. As mobile devices get more powerful, and people do more of their computing on them, Intel runs the risk of missing out on the biggest game in town.
Of course it's not about to let that happen, which is why Atom (Menlow) was created and why its roadmap (below) has it getting smaller and lower power in future. That's also why it has announced partnerships with TSMC, LG and Nokia, why it's buying embedded software maker Wind River, and why it continues to invest heavily in WiMAX.
All these moves represent a gradual build-up of technologies, alliances and expertise in the mobile phone sector, something Intel knows it can't do overnight because it's trying to become a dominant force in a mature, highly competitive industry, from pretty much a standing start.
