Intel's next stop on tablet strategy: Computex
Intel's earnings conference call was a bit light when it came to the chip giant's master plan for smartphones and tablets, but the company did preview a demofest at Computex May 31 to June 4.
If you were looking for a lot of tablet talk from Intel you probably were disappointed on Tuesday. Intel talked PC growth, data centers and Sandy Bridge. Tablet chatter boiled down to this comment from Intel CEO Paul Otellini.
You'll see quite a bit of tablet demonstrations at Computex. If you notice what we did at IDF in Beijing last week, there were a lot of tablet-centric announcements there around MeeGo and Windows and Android. And so we're heads-down on a number of designs on tablets, on all three of those operating systems. We received the Android code, honeycomb version of Android, source code from Google, and we're actively doing the port on that. And expect to be able to ramp those machines over the course of this year for a number of customers. In terms of phones, obviously, we lost Nokia, which took a lot of wind out of the sails for phones this year. We've redirected those resources on to a number of other major accounts, focusing on carriers who want their own phone devices and also on handset manufacturers. They're all based on Medfield, which is, I think, still the first 32-nanometer phone apps processor in the industry. And quite frankly, the limit, in terms of them getting to market, is going to be the interoperability testing of the networks at this point in time. So I think I would be very disappointed if you didn't see Intel-based phones for sale 12 months from now.
The other notable comment from Otellini is that the data center buildout---and all those Xeon chips---are going to cloud services for mobile platforms. If Intel plays its cards right, it's possible it could benefit from both ends of the mobile spectrum. For now, there's little to go on when it comes to Intel's mobile strategy besides future demos.
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