Skip to Main Content

2012 Year in Review: Intel

It's still 'wait until next year' for Intel in the mobile device market, but the chip maker is one technology heavyweight with the resources and patience to keep plugging away.

December 28, 2012

Several years ago, I compared Intel's market dominance to the New England Patriots. These days, I'm leaning more towards the Chicago Cubs—well, at least in the mobile device market.

Like the perennially lackluster Cubs, there's a "just wait 'til next year" vibe that's settled over Intel's efforts to produce competitive mobile chips. You could put ultrabooks, a product category "inspired" by Intel which in 2012 didn't live up to the chip giant's expectations, in that bucket as well.

Of course, Intel has the resources and patience to brush aside short-term setbacks and truly afford to think in terms of next year—or even next decade for that matter. The Cubs may never win the World Series, but the smart money is on Intel eventually getting a decent share of the mobile device market.

It just didn't happen in 2012.

This was the year the company was supposed to , the dominant designer of the processor architecture used in most smartphones and tablets shipping today. Did it happen? Well, Intel did get a few with its Medfield-generation SoCs. And there are all those due out, well, next year.

Ah, but in the coming months, Intel will be moving its Atom products to the 22-nanometer process and for even lower power draws and minimal power leakage. So will 2013 be the year the chip giant finally cracks mobile?

It could be. But one thing's for sure—Intel will keep plugging away until it gets there, whether it's next year or later. In May, Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini for the company's growing edge over fabless competitors as semiconductor manufacturing gets more complex and expensive.

(Speaking of Otellini, who that he'll be retiring in May, we'll find out who his successor is, you guessed it, next year.)

The Intel boss predicted that his company and a handful of other vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturers were on the cusp of a "Golden Age" where cutting-edge process technologies would confer even greater market advantages to the firms that develop and implement them first.

"I believe we are developing a set of unique assets that will give us increasingly differentiated competitive solutions going on for years," Otellini said at Intel's annual Investor Day.

The gist of the talk was that major process technology innovations like transistor shrinks are giving Intel an increasingly bigger and longer-lasting leg-up on the competition. The upshot, if you're ready to buy this, is that Intel's chips will inevitably start to pressure ARM with the sheer weight of the company's technology advantages.

Of course, mobile isn't the only game in town and Intel remained dominant in 2012 in selling processors into the data center, where the company's footprint is greater than ever.

This year, Intel rolled out its new Romley-class Xeon server chips, putting further pressure on struggling Advanced Micro Devices. The chip giant even managed to salvage an aborted x86-based GPU project called Larrabee from several years ago and as a new Many Integrated Core (MIC) co-processor product called Xeon Phi. There's that patience and long-term thinking on display again.

Then there's the PC market. Is it getting hammered by the rise of consumer demand for tablets and smartphones? Sure, but there are still a ton of desktops and laptops being sold. Intel, as usual, was in the thick of that business in 2012.

The company also managed to set the agenda for PC makers this past year with its ultrabook initiative. Along with Microsoft's Windows 8 release, Intel's push for ultrabooks defined the PC market in 2012. Unfortunately, reports from research firms like Gartner suggested that actual ultrabook sales never quite lived up to the hype this past year, much less Intel's aggressive forecasting for the category.

That's an area of concern for Intel going into 2013, said analyst Patrick Moorhead (see sidebar for Moorhead's full take on Intel's year). Other areas to keep an eye on next year include the blossoming microserver segment, which Intel seemed to dance around , and the introduction of next-gen "Haswell" chips for laptops and tablets that could .

For more, see PCMag's year in review for , , , , and .