Intel Believes That PC is Undergoing Transition to a Tablet

After the U.S. PC manufacturer reported weak profits, Intel has expressed how it believes the PC is undergoing a transition to the tablet.

Paul Otellini's following responses suggest that Intel and its PC partners are targeting the tablet market with Windows 8 devices.

"We are in the midst of a radical transformation of the computing experience with the blurring of form factors and adoption of new user interfaces. It's no longer necessary to choose between a PC and a tablet. Convertibles and detachables combined with Windows 8 and touch provide a 2-for-1, no-compromise computing experience."

"In the first quarter we launch Haswell. The single largest generation-to-generation battery life improvement in Intel history...We have a line of sight into what our customers are designing around Haswell, which is this year's innovative Core [processor] product, and Broadwell, which is next year's. I've seen the prototypes of the industrial designs. They're really exciting products. Our customers have not had this level of performance in this kind of form factor before. 10-plus-inch [screen size] types of product are going to be more classic PC level of performance, enabled by these convertible, detachable form factors that will only get thinner when Haswell and Broadwell come on."

He continued on to discuss Intel's competition from ARM: "We've looked at the [new] A15 [ARM chip]. We know our own silicon in terms of Bay Trail and Clover Trail+ and we're very comfortable we can maintain a performance lead here. These devices are simply becoming very small computers, and that's what Intel is exceptional at."

"We are very interested in being a selected foundry manufacturer for certain customers. We don't see ourselves as a general-purpose foundry or competing with general-purpose foundries. We would not take business that enables a competitor. We have a crawl-walk-run strategy. We're still in the crawl stage."

Lenovo recently stressed that it believes the industry is not in a post-PC era. However, official figures suggest otherwise: during the October of 2012, tablet display shipments exceeded that of notebooks. Global tablet shipments are expected to surpass notebook shipments during 2013.

While HP topped the global market for the PC industry during 2012, the year marked the first time the industry experienced a year-on-year decline during the holiday season.

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