Shipments of Prescott, the 90-nanometer successor to
intel's Pentium 4, will account for 60% of all Intel desktop
processors by the second quarter of next year, and a version of the
technology will be incorporated into the Celeron product line, said
Intel president and chief operating officer Paul
Otellini.
Otellini added that Prescott's clock speed will hit 4GHz by the
end of next year. The chip will ship in this year's fourth quarter,
but systems based on the chip are unlikely to have much impact, if
any, on the holiday shopping season.
Otellini and Intel chief executive officer Craig Barrett updated
the analyst community on a number of Intel's products, and outlined
some of the company's strategies for increasing revenue outside of
industry growth.
It will be hard for the company to grow any faster than the
general market in those areas, Barrett added, because of the
dominating presence Intel enjoys in the PC and low-end server
markets. Intel intends to pursue business in emerging markets such
as China and India, and emerging technologies such as the WiMax
metro-area network wireless technology.
Most of Intel's growth already comes from outside the US, and
that trend will likely continue over several years, Barrett
said.
Intel will ship its first WiMax chips by the end of the year,
Otellini said. WiMax, based on the 802.16 standard ratified by the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is designed to
connect users wirelessly over an area measured in square miles,
rather than the more limited coverage afforded by Wi-Fi wireless
access points and devices today.
The company will also ship its first chip that combines
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi next year. Intel recently purchased Mobilian, a
company that has developed a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi chipset.
Mobile technology has been a huge growth area for the company,
as many consumers and businesses have replaced older desktop PCs
with notebooks. Dothan, the 90-nanometer follow-on to the Pentium
M, is also scheduled for introduction next year.
On the server side of the business, Otellini announced that
Intel has now shipped 100,000 Itanium 2 processors, comparable to
the unit volumes shipped by companies such as Sun Microsystems and
IBM which also make processors for high-end servers.
The road to Itanium's adoption has been bumpy, but its growth
has come at the expense of Sun, Otellini said.
"Sun, as Craig [Barrett] recently said, is now the Apple of the
server world. They're not in a position to drive standards,"
Otellini claimed, alluding to the deal that Sun announced
on Tuesday to adopt Intel competitor Advanced Micro Devices'
Opteron chip in a line of low-end servers.
However, Intel also acknowledged that its decision to raise
flash memory prices in the beginning of 2003 cost it both market
share and revenue. The company hopes to make up ground in flash
shipments with the rise of multilevel cells, which combine flash
and static Ram memory chips into a small package designed for
smartphones and high-end PDAs.
Tom Krazit writes IDG News Service