Intel says it will continue its aggressive push into the smartphone and tablet markets despite the departure of Anand Chandrasekher, who ran Intel's Ultra Mobility Group.
Intel, which is trying to gain some traction in the highly competitive and
potentially lucrative smartphone space, announced March 21 that the executive
leading the effort is leaving the company.
In
a brief statement, the giant chip maker said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice
president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, is leaving the
company to pursue other interests. Mike Bell and Dave Whalen, both vice
presidents with the mobility group, will co-manage the unit, according to
Intel.
Chandrasekher's
departure comes as Intel is looking to expand its reach beyond its core server
and PC processor business, in large part by trying to make inroads into the
smartphone and tablet markets currently dominated by chip makers such as Samsung,
Texas Instrument and Qualcomm, which use
chip designs from ARM Holdings.
David
Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel
Architecture Group, said the company's wireless efforts will continue despite
the departure of Chandrasekher, who had been at Intel for 24 years.
"Intel
remains committed to this business," Perlmutter said in a statement. "We
continue to make the investments needed to ensure that the best user experience
on smartphones and handhelds runs on Intel Architecture, and to ship a phone
this year."
Intel
is the world's largest chip maker, with more than 80 percent of the global
market, but to date it has been unable to make much noise in the ultramobile
device space. Intel officials are saying that will change this year, with the
release of the company's 32-nanometer "Medfield" Atom processor. During a talk
at a conference in December, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said smartphones
powered by Medfield chips will begin reaching the market later this year,
and that the momentum behind the processor will continue into 2012.
Otellini
reportedly said during the Barclays Capital Global Technology Conference that
the competition with ARM is a "marathon, not
a sprint."
In
addition, Otellini said there were several PC OEMs, including Dell, Asus,
Lenovo and Toshiba, that were planning to use Atom chips in almost three dozen
upcoming tablet designs, which would start rolling out this year. Intel has two
Atom platforms for tablets-"Oak Trail" for tablets running Windows, and
"Moorestown" for those running Google's Android OS and MeeGo, a Linux-based
operating system developed by Intel and Nokia.
Intel
has made numerous moves to gain traction in the ultramobile world, in
particular with the $1.4 billion acquisition of Infineon Technologies' wireless
business, a deal that closed earlier this year. More recently, Intel this month
announced it had bought
SySDsoft, a company that makes wireless networking software, particularly
in the area of 4G.
However,
Intel also suffered a setback this year when officials with Nokia announced
they were going to put Microsoft's
Windows Phone 7 OS onto their handheld devices instead. Intel officials
said Nokia's decision would not derail their MeeGo efforts.
Even
as Intel looks to muscle into ARM's
dominance in the ultramobile space, the two companies also will be squaring off
in the data center. ARM and several of its
customers, including Marvell, Nvidia and Calxeda, are looking to
move the ARM architecture up the stack and into low-power servers in such
environments as cloud computing and Web serving.
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