Brian Krzanich has been at the helm of Intel for less than a week, but he’s gotten a lot done. In a company-wide email obtained by Reuters, Krzanich told his team that he will be taking direct control of Intel’s mobile communications group, its PC client group and its data center group. All three of those groups previously reported to Dadi Perlmutter, head of Intel’s architecture group. All of Intel’s manufacturing operations will report to the company’s president, Renee James.
Intel is also forming a new group to focus on devices, which will be headed up by Mike Bell. Bell is a former Apple executive who was also senior vice president of product development at Palm. For the past 3 years he has been helping to lead Intel’s mobile chip unit, perhaps the mostly closely watched part of the chipmaker’s business.
Outlook for mobile
Intel was late to the mobile party, passing up the chance to make chips for the product that would become the iPhone. Its Atom processors have less than 1% of the mobile market, and increasing that share is a clear priority for Krzanich.
“I think at most Intel is going to sell 5 to 10 million Atom smartphone chips this year … so that would still give them less than 1% share in the market,” said Sravan Kundojjala, senior analyst for handset component technologies at Strategy Analytics. “But they are going to new process technologies next year … so those chips could potentially change the game.”
Intel has already started shipping chips based on its 22 nanometer process technology, and Kundojjala expects those to appear in smartphones by next year. By 2015, he expects to see handsets based on Intel’s 14 nanometer process technology. After that, the world’s largest chipmaker could start to be a more important presence in mobile.
“I don’t think they’ll gain double digit share in smartphone chips at least for the next two to three years,” said Kundojjala. “I think the smartphone story will start only after three years.”
The market for tablet processors is smaller, but Intel may move faster here. Just this week, Techhive reported that Samsung’s next Galaxy Tab will be powered by an Intel processor.
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