Intel roadmap drives goal of dominating wireless as effectively as PCs
Published: Thursday 27 November, 2003
Intel CEO Craig Barrett has laid down the roadmap for Intel’s future chip strategy, with a strong emphasis on miniaturising Centrino and driving standards for the communications sector as it has for computers.
Intel said its first WiMAX chips will roll out before the end of this year, and then, in spring of 2004, we will see ultra low power Centrino Wi-Fi chips that will be suitable for PDAs, smartphones and consumer devices, and its first combined Bluetooth/Wi-Fi chipsets, incorporating technology recently acquired with Mobilian.
The chip giant may be leading the market with WiMAX, and with some of its more futuristic goals, such as its adaptive radio, but it is definitely following in Wi-Fi. Its low power Centrino will come at least six months after similar devices from Broadcom, with AirForce One, and Philips, and of course, users are still waiting for 802.11g support (see separate story).
However, the market weight of Intel means that its low power Centrino will undoubtedly be snapped up by many PDA makers, though its success among the consumer electronics manufacturers – which have their own political agendas and very different structures to the PC makers – is less assured. As with its cellphone chip strategy, the pushing of Centrino into consumer devices highlights how well Intel knows that, as the worlds of the PC, the communications device and the home entertainment product converge, it needs to dominate all three. But, just as in the phone sector, this is a far larger gamble for Intel than pushing its Wi-Fi capabilities in the PC space that it dominates so effectively.
The goal may be ambitious but it is unavoidable if Intel is not to be sidelined in a future where the PC is losing its prominence. Barrett’s roadmap reflects this, stating clearly that Intel aims to drive and steer standards in the communications world as it has in the computer space. The goal, he told financial analysts, is to get the telecoms industry to rebuild itself to resemble the computer business, where most hardware makers base their products on open standards and off the shelf components. Intel aims to build chip architectures and software that will drive these standards in the communications and consumer sectors as well as PCs. To stress the point, Barrett said “most” of the company’s R&D spending in the near future will go on wireless handheld devices including cellphones, communications infrastructure components and consumer electronics devices for the digital home.
President Paul Otellini, at the same analysts’ briefing, said that the key architectures underlying this process will be hyperthreading and Centrino. Key to Intel’s success will be what Barrett calls “adjacency” – the spread of technologies invented for the conventional computing market into new areas. The use of PDA technology in new era smartphones, which are also consumer gaming and camera devices, is the most obvious example and points to a future where technology created for Centrino notebooks will be the root of Intel’s whole product range. At the basis of this is the plan to evolve Centrino into a chipset supporting many wireless standards, from Bluetooth to WiMAX, and beyond that, the adaptive radio, a digital silicon radio that links intelligently to the most appropriate available network.
As well as the low footprint, low power Centrinos, next year will also see Intel launching the Grantsdale chipset, which incorporates software that converts Centrino-enabled notebooks into Wi-Fi access points, which can form ad hoc communications meshes with other devices. This will be the first concrete product to emerge from Intel’s enthusiastic development of Wi-Fi, WiMAX and UltraWideBand mesh architectures and could have a serious negative effect on the access point market. This will be particularly likely in the consumer space – in the enterprise, mesh will have to prove itself on some key fronts, notably security, before companies will replace conventional WLans with PCs that communicate directly.
There has been considerable sound and fury about Intel’s AP move, with criticisms that the company will deter enterprises from adopting Wi-Fi by introducing technology with unproven security, but this ignore the facts that several Wi-Fi companies have already made similar moves – Apple has offered a software base station for years that simulates a dedicated AP – and that the mesh features can be disabled. Anyway, Grantsdale and the low power Centrino are firmly positioned as products to further Intel’s goal of extending its WLan chipset out of the business market into the digital home.
Most of Intel’s growth now comes outside the US and it expects this to continue, with increasing focus on emerging markets such as India and China, particularly for WiMAX and Centrino.
Otellini said Centrino has generated $2bn in revenue since its launch in March and by the end of next year, companies such as Toshiba and Dell expect to ship 80% of their business notebooks and 50% of their consumer models with Centrino as standard. Intel now has 8% of the $28bn cellphone market.
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