Qualcomm is putting Anand Chandrasekher, who left Intel in 2011 after 25 years with the company, in charge of its marketing and communications efforts.
The former head of Intels mobility efforts
will now be the top marketing official at Qualcomm, a chip maker whose
ARM-based Snapdragon processors are found in smartphones and tablets and could
expand into notebooks.
Anand Chandrasekher, a 25-year veteran at
Intel who until last year was one of the companys senior vice presidents and
general manager for the Ultra Mobility Group, is now the chief marketing
officer at Qualcomm, the company announced Aug. 6. He will report to Steve
Mollenkopf, Qualcomms president and chief operating officer.
Mollenkopf said in a statement that
Chandrasekher is well-suited to help grow Qualcomms communications and
marketing efforts across the world and to amplify our consumer offerings to new
audiences.
Chandrasekher
left Intel in March 2011 after leading the giant chip makers efforts to
expand into the booming mobile device space, particularly smartphones and
tablets. The company is looking to make inroads into a space currently
dominated by chips designed by ARM Holdings and made by the likes of Qualcomm,
Samsung Electronics, Texas Instruments and Nvidia.
Chandrasekher played a key role in overseeing
Intels development of the low-power Atom chips, which initially targeted the
netbook space but has since expanded into smartphones and tablets. The first
Atom-based smartphones began hitting the market this year, with Lenovo, Orange
and Lava International launching devices running on the Atom Z2460 Medfield
chips.
For Qualcomm, Chandrasekhers hiring means
the company gets a chip veteran at a time when it is looking to expand its
reach within the mobile space. Just as Intel and, to a lesser extent, Advanced
Micro Devices are making efforts to encroach on ARMs dominance in smartphones
and tablets, Qualcomm and other ARM license holders see an opportunity to move
their highly energy-efficient chips into
such
systems as notebooks and low-power servers. Qualcomm officials are looking
to leverage their quad-core Snapdragon chips to take advantage of opportunities
presented by the upcoming release of Microsofts Windows 8 OS, which has been
optimized for tablets and comes in a versionWindows RTthat runs on ARMs
system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs.
Qualcomm executives have said the quad-core
versions of its Snapdragon S4 chips will help OEMs create Windows 8 laptops
that are thinner and lighter than Intel-based Ultrabooks and Apples popular
MacBook Air.
Qualcomm has seen its sales and profits
continue to grow in recent quartersthe company said last month that profits in
the second calendar quarter jumped 17 percent over the same period in 2011but
officials also have talked about shipment shortfalls of its 28-nanometer
processors used in smartphones due to capacity problems with manufacturing
partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Intel officials are pushing Ultrabooks, which
are very thin and light notebooks that offer the traditional capabilities of
laptops as well as features found in tablets, including instant-on and
always-connected capabilities, long battery life and, in some models, touch-screens.
Almost two dozen Ultrabooks based on Intels 32nm Sandy Bridge chips are on the
market, but Intel is expecting more than 100 designs running on the companys
22nm Ivy Bridge chips to launch this year, offering greater performance and
energy efficiency at a lower price.
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