Intel - the company you don't already know

Is Intel still 'that chips company'? It used to be a fairly straightforward beast. One of the oldest and most successful names in tech, it produced microprocessors, sometimes memory chips, some networking gear and maybe the odd oddball device. It loved roadmaps and providing the engines for laptops, PCs, workstations and servers.

Are we saying forget all that? Are we just calling it an ebusiness company? No, neither of those two things.

Intel has set itself up at the centre of a world of converging computing and communications (http://www.silicon.com/a55462 ), and with good reason. It's not just that Intel silicon will appear in many kinds of products, with several functions increasingly integrated on single chips.

To judge by the Intel Developer Forum held in San Jose this week - the company's twelfth and biggest such shindig to date - communications and all it entails is the next frontier for the giant. It may talk (no yawning now) about the convergence of computing and communications but we all know it has more to prove on the comms side.

And when it says communications, it doesn't mean selling to telcos servers that use its chips (which, by the way, isn't half as lucrative as it once was - http://www.silicon.com/a55510 ). Sean Maloney is head of Intel's Communications business and hit one nail on the head this week - he called 802.11 Wi-Fi "a technology with phenomenal promise - like the browser, which democratised computing". (http://www.silicon.com/a55462 )

It wasn't a statement about how 3G or 2.5G cellular networks will do against Wi-Fi - there is little chance Wi-Fi will handle all a user's data needs and Intel components will find themselves almost as much in mobile handsets as in access points and PC cards (but see http://www.silicon.com/a54891 for more on this subject) - but about a new side of the company. It clearly doesn't just want to provide the brains for products but also the mouths and ears too. It's a connected world, as we're sure you know.

Ask Intel whether it has to change as a company to be at the heart of communications - to be in phones, PDAs, home entertainment equipment (for example http://www.silicon.com/a55477 ) and beyond - and it won't be quite so friendly. It still sees itself as the silicon company and silicon drives all these things. Simple.

And don't mention how well Intel's communications business is doing. It may haul in 10 per cent of revenues but it's still loss-making, albeit not in the shape some telecoms equipment companies have ended up in.

Maybe a large number of IDF developers (30 per cent) specialising in communications and a lot of related hype doesn't mean Intel is changing all that much. Microsoft may make 80 per cent of its money from Windows and Office applications but that won't stop it shouting about its work in a dozen other interesting (loss-making) areas. It's the same at Intel which, as one executive acknowledged, is simply preparing for the future.

Just when you think you have someone pigeon-holed...

silicon.com will be publishing one of our 'Vendor Dossier' insider's guides to the company that brought you Intel Inside in the next two weeks.