Paul Otellini, President & COO, Intel Corporation, is designated to take over as the company’s fifth CEO in 2005. When he does, he will inherit a company with a legacy of success and paranoia. On his first visit to India—a country current CEO Craig Barrett has visited thrice over—Otellini calls it as a ‘learning trip’. In Mumbai and Bangalore, Otellini outlined to CyberMedia's editors Intel's plans to dominate the wireless space.

Intel wants to be a provider of building blocks for the Internet economy. It has invested huge sums to get a foothold in the networking and communications segments. Yet, in these spaces, the company is mostly a secondary or marginal player—it’s not really up there… Are you going to be a serious player in these spaces, or is this just technology to facilitate your mobile platforms?

We focus on most companies in this space, and if you look carefully, we have found many architecture options that are beginning to sell. Some work is being done with Intel’s Centrino. As we build upon the technology, it is increasingly getting better and we are integrating this into our platforms, chipsets and microprocessors. We want to be the world leader in Wi-Fi products.

The fact is that everyone is aggressive in Wi-Fi—it is a pervasive technology. Get a load of this—27,000 access points are being deployed and installed every day, that’s one every 3 seconds. And there’s been a sharp reduction in costs, making the technology very cheap. As we look at the competition, our opportunity to use our knowledge base and having married this with the communication platform, we have a long-term advantage over discrete wireless members who don’t have intrinsic knowledge.

Semiconductors? I am not going to give you an Intel forecast!—we never forecast numbers. Our first half this year is slightly lower than the first half of last year. The industry, as per IDC, can look at a growth of 6-10%. We should be in that range.. But I am not one to argue with numbers.

Yes, a push is there, but it’s closer to $300 million. And yes. it’s a very large plan. Part of it is for a worldwide advertising campaign, part of it for working on cooperative fields with airports, hotels, airplane manufacturers worldwide, and validate the hotspots so that they work well with Centrino. A part of it would be used as venture capital to fund small companies that do work in the area of accelerating Wi-Fi rollouts.

The sales team here are trying to boost the environment of Wi-Fi take-off. We are driving high-performance network intelligence where we look at every bit and put intelligence on it. That is what is taking Moore’s Law to the network.

Moore’s Law holds good here as well. While Moore’s Law started with the sheer number of transistors packed in a chip, the progress was measured in terms of GHz. If you go back to transistor count, mobility is very much part of that. It’s not about just driving the clock speed overtime, but adding functionality. Today, mobility is more important to us. Intel develops more and more features that are architectural to take advantage of transistors. Features like hyper-threading on the desktop don’t require a lot to be added on the transistors front, but they do double up chip performance.

It’s not only about transistors or speed, architecture counts too.

We have been working on the 64-bit architecture for nearly a decade and are about to introduce our third-gen silicon as the world’s fastest computer—for transaction processing. This is only going to get better and we will pick that up to a factor of 10 over the next two years. Also, the architecture is much better in terms of scalability. There’s a lot more to enterprise computing and supercomputing than 64 bits… But it’s back and we’re very happy with where it is and where it’s going.

But really, there’s really no need to have 64-bit on the desktop, at least not in the foreseeable future. No other application takes advantage of it. One exception would be workstations and we have Itanium there. At some point of time, applications and OSs on desktops will require 64-bit addressability and memory prices will come down enough so that you can afford 64-bit on your desktop. At that point of time, expect Intel to be the player in this space.

Our intention is to provide all the standards in the offering as fast as possible—high performance at a low price.

Finally, what are the prospects for Intel’s communications chips business?

We are doing well in growing the Wi-Fi space. The design activity is going very well. The only hiccup is that the industry has not matured yet. Handsets with large cache memory with the intelligence inside based on PCA architecture are increasing logic inside handsets. Handset technology is growing, and I expect it to be a key player.