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Intel woos home users with Centrino

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp., which spent $300 million last year promoting its Centrino notebook computer chips as ideal for businesspeople, is shifting its focus to the home user with advertising in the likes of People magazine and on Home & Garden and Comedy Central television.



In a broad-based marketing push, which includes a TV ad of a vacationing couple in Sicily sending home videos from their laptop PC, the world's largest computer chip maker is targeting home PC users, seen as a fast-growing market for mobile computing.



"The Centrino notebooks were being pushed by IBM and Dell, who tend to focus a lot on corporate customers," said Nathan Brookwood, who runs the semiconductor market analysis firm, Insight 64.



Intel, based in Santa Clara, California, nonetheless faces heightened competition from rivals Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Transmeta Corp., both of which have said they are stepping up their advertising this year.



Brookwood said retail stores, the source for many home computer users, sell a large number of so-called desktop replacement laptops that use AMD chips. On the ultra-light notebook side, Transmeta Corp.'s new chip called Efficeon now appears in Sharp notebooks in Japan.



According to market research firm IDC, semiconductor sales for mobile PCs are expected to grow an average of 16 percent a year for the next several years, far faster than the 2.9 percent growth rate for desktop computer chips. Overall, the market for mobile PC chips is expected to reach $30 billion in 2008 from $14.4 billion last year.



Intel, which did not disclose how much it would spend to promote Centrino this year, said its ads would appear in magazines like Instyle, Glamour, Food & Wine and Cooking Light, in addition to business publications such as BusinessWeek and Fortune. Commercials will appear on the CNN and Fox News TV networks and on the Web and billboards.



Centrino is the brand name for a trio of Intel chips: a mobile microprocessor called Pentium-M, a supporting chipset to link the processor with the rest of the computer, and a radio that connects to Wi-Fi data communications networks.



Virtually all major PC makers build computers that feature Centrino, though many also sell mobile versions of other Intel and AMD chips. If PC makers agree to use all three Centrino chips, they can use the Centrino logo and become eligible for Centrino marketing funds to support their own ad campaigns.

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