Two years ago, Intel held a contest for college students, asking them to come up with new uses for the company's Atom processor. One proposal: a shower that regulates water temperature and plays music from the Internet. While Intel doesn't plan to enter the shower market, it is putting its chips into gas pumps, cars, musical instruments, and other devices where few processors have gone before.
Chips that act as the brains of electronic devices other than computers or mobile phones are known as embedded processors and represent a $10 billion market. That's small compared with the $34.5 billion market for PC processors. Intel will have $43 billion in revenues this year. Of that, only about $1 billion comes from embedded products. Still, Atom sales are growing fast, and the company is counting on the chip to help break its dependence on the slowing PC market.
Although Atom chips aren't as powerful as the ones that run PCs, they're much cheaper, which makes them economical for powering all kinds of devices. Nautilus puts Atom chips into its treadmills to stream Internet video onto built-in displays and upload the times and distances from workouts. Digital advertising signage is another growth market for Intel. LG Electronics is using Atom chips in signs that will recognize the age, gender, and other characteristics of passersby and change the advertising pitch accordingly. Since Atoms also use little power and don't require bulky batteries to run, they're popping up in unexpected parts of the world. In India, banks are using them in handheld terminals that serve rural areas off the electricity grid. Once a month or so, an itinerant teller visits a village, giving locals access to loans and other banking services.
ARM Holdings sells designs for similarly energy-efficient chips that are licensed by customers including Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Marvell. Those companies already have a hold on the mobile-phone market—one area Intel has failed to penetrate—and are trying to expand that dominance into the embedded market.
In the second quarter, Intel received 3,800 inquiries from customers that wanted to design Atom into their products. Some 1,200 of those proposals are on their way to becoming Atom-based products. While Intel isn't designing a different chip for each customer, it is offering so-called systems-on-a-chip, semiconductors with the functionality of multiple chips built into one. That makes it easier for electronics manufacturers to get their products to market quickly.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_37/b4194029898101.htm
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