It's all about cool
Even if Intel develops relationships with every key player in the handset market, its principle challenge will remain designing chipsets that are both cool enough to be put into mobile handsets and use sufficiently little power to be left on all day without recharging.
While it would be rash to bet against Intel achieving this eventually, there's a whole segment of the technology industry that already has: the ARM ecosystem.
ARM is a UK company that designs low power processor cores and then licenses those designs to other companies to incorporate in their chipsets. In the ecosystem of companies that make chips based on ARM designs, the biggest player is probably Qualcomm.
At today's prices, Qualcomm's market cap (the total value of its shares) is around $75 bn, compared to nearly $90 bn for Intel. Traditional Intel competitors AMD and NVIDIA currently have market caps of around $2.5 bn and $6 bn respectively.
Until recently, followers of the PC industry haven't had to pay too much attention to Qualcomm as it has confined itself mainly to the mobile phone sector. But as the PC and telco markets converge and ARM based chips become more powerful, Qualcomm's not just competing with Intel's future smartphone offerings, but is taking the fight to it in larger form factors too.
To find out more about what we can expect to see from Qualcomm we spoke to senior director of business development for Europe, Ben Timmons, at the Open Mobile Summit in London.
