Intel Krzanich on Smartphones: ‘I Want to Enter This Market Smartly’
Last fall, Intel (INTC) chief executive Brian Krzanich said he didn’t want to subsidize smartphone hardware makers as he had tablet OEMs to win processor share in the hotly-contested mobile market.
At the time, while allowing that he’d been parading Intel’s smartphone chip blueprints to potential customers, Krzanich also said he wasn’t too keen on setting a smartphone sales target as he did with his well-publicized goal to ship 40 million tablet processors, a bar the company ultimately exceeded.
Six months later, Krzanich still is reluctant to publicly announce a smartphone chip shipment target, preferring instead to outline Intel’s strategy for gaining a larger seat at the smartphone table, as he told NetworkWorld in an interview at Mobile World Congress (MWC).
At MWC, Intel introduced the new Atom X3 chip and rebranded its entire lineup of Atom SoCs, moving from code-names and product numbers to the categories Atom x3, x5 and x7, in a similar nomenclature scheme to its iCore i3, i5 and i7. Intel also showed off a handful of handsets featuring the Atom X3 chip, code-named Sofia.
Here are some NetworkWorld snippets of Krzanich on smartphones and wearables:
On Intel’s smartphone market strategy:
“First we have to get the right products for the smartphone space. It’s a tighter form factor, you’ve got to be just right…You saw us announce our Sofia product line, which is really the first fully integrated SOC [system on a chip] with modem, all of the connectivity, all in one piece of silicon.”
“When I think about cell phones, I think about two paths to market. One is going to be with our partners, especially some our of key OEM partners like Asus and Lenovo, and then our silicon partners with Rockchip and Spreadtrum. The other path is—you can see us doing it already with the tablet space—where we bring in some of the innovation we originally had for PCs and bring it down the stack.”
On mobile chip upgrades:
“Right now there’s a series of products. There’s the Sofia line—we’re trying to come out with multiple products per year. At least one to two products per year within Intel on the Sofia line. Then you go to Cherry Trail, it will be like every other year.”
On linkage between Intel mobile devices and Intel data center hardware:
“We are trying to do Wi-Fi gateways and things like that, trying to make it so you can recognize an Intel device faster. We have that silicon pathway, we’re connecting silicon to silicon. We always make it so that we’re agnostic to some extent, that we can connect to anybody and we can connect back to anybody’s device.”
On wearables:
“I’m a firm believer that if a bunch of tech companies design and build wearables, they will have limited success. There will be a bunch of tech people wearing them and the average person is not going to be a good user. People have been in the fashion industry and have worn fashion products for years because they are very good and know what people want. We have to go through those partnerships.”
