Age: 57
Location: Santa Clara, Calif.
The CEO of the world’s largest chip-maker may have once considered revising the “Intel Inside” slogan, but it’s never been more apt. Since refocusing in 2006, Intel has won back market share from rival AMD and even picked up Apple’s business, shrinking its Core 2 Duo chip by 60 percent for the MacBook Air.
It’s a prelude to Intel’s new strategy, targeting the mini-notebook market, whose $100 to $299 price range is expected to fuel sales of nearly 60 million units in 2011. Intel has already won a convert in ASUS, which plans to switch to a 45-nm processor in its popular Eee PC. Then there’s Centrino 2, available in June, which will combine Intel’s 45-nanometer processor with a whole new chipset with three times the graphics performance and baked-in support for Mobile WiMAX. There has been plenty of speculation that Intel will throw $2 billion into Sprint’s Xohm Mobile WiMAX network—to ensure that its own investment into mobile broadband chips wasn’t for naught.
Although Otellini warned in early March that Intel would take a hit from the rapidly dropping prices of flash memory, at the same time the company is entering the solid state drive business, planning to introduce 80GB and 160GB models by mid-year. So 2008 could be the year that Intel puts serious pressure not only on AMD but also on leading memory manufacturers, including Samsung, and graphics powerhouses such as Nvidia.
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