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Intel CEO, Paul Otellini, reportedly stated at the Barclays Capital investor conference "It is fashionable to write off the PC about every three or four years, and it just doesn't die." On the surface, the comment seems dead wrong. It would appear Intel's CEO should be preparing for early retirement, but Otellini went on to describe what a PC actually is. "The PC you bought 15 years ago looks nothing like the one you have today," he said. Paul went on further to discuss notebook and netbook growth, promoting Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture.

Mr. Otellini discussed tablets and how they interact with laptop designs, and this is when his view of the marketplace veered off course. "I don’t think, at the end of the day, tablets are cannibalizing it. They are not replacements for notebooks. They are a competitor for discretionary income disposition. So you walk into Best Buy and you’ve got $400 burning a hole in your pocket, or in the case of the iPad, $600 burning a hole in your pocket, and you want to buy something cool for Christmas for your wife or kid or something. It’s a competitor."

Another way to view what Intel's CEO was saying with this last statement is: "Right now we have nothing to compete with the iPad, as our Atom processors soak too much juice and run too hot. When we tune Atoms down they are doggedly slow. ARM is blowing us away right now, moving faster north than we can move south. Apple's custom integration of ARM married to their OS isn't helping matters, so for now we'll deploy a bunch of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). We'll pooh-pooh the whole iPad as nothing more than a fad. We'll ignore Best Buy's CEO and industry analysts stating our laptops sales are being eaten by iPads. We'll chalk up iPad as nothing more than people wasting all that cash burning holes in their pocket in this horrible economy (no one will buy into that but we'll say it anyway). We'll throw sales numbers out there to make Apple's rapidly growing iOS and A4 growth platform look irrelevant. Once we have something to sell, we will then declare the tablet as the new netbook that everyone should buy."

AMD was left for dead until Intel, fat and happy, let their guard down and gave new life to AMD with their 64-bit processing. Hot on the heels of that screw-up, Intel sold their Xscale ARM-based business in 2006, just as the smartphone revolution was set to take off. Evidently Intel wasn't satisfied with those blunders and is going for the gold! Intel's at it again missing a date with tablet solutions, while Apple, ARM, Qualcomm and nVIDIA solidify their share's in mobile devices.

Despite Intel's miscues, the company is fantastic at producing powerful desktop and higher-end laptop computing solutions through their x86 architecture. But the core of these SISC-based solutions was never intended (or thought of) to consider low-heat, low-power draw solutions, and it isn't in Intel's DNA to deliver efficient processors.

In the same way Intel made it into the notebook world their amazing cash and engineering might, it will eventually get them into tablets and some day smart-phones. But the looming question on Paul Otellini's mind should be whether the market will even need them by the time Intel arrives?... Microsoft and Intel dominated the growth market of the PC's in the 90's and continued to ride their success into the new century. Today is the mobile revolution, and while Intel won't die any time soon, the thousand pound gorilla is getting left behind on the desktop.

1 Comment

1. Randinator ~ December 9, 2010 16:56
   iPad 2.0 is going to rock the market to it's core. Best-ever screen, cameras, dual-processor speeds, and maybe lower price for entry box? Intel was the Microsoft buddy back in the day, but they'll cozy up to Google garbage soon enough.

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