Electronics Weekly
The group makes chips for home gateways and routers where it competes with Qualcomm and Broadcom. Sales of the group are said to be about $450 million annually.
Intel has been in and out of many attempted diversifications: watches, mobile APs, PLDs, ASICs, XScale, LCOS, WiMAX, CLECs, VOIP, STB, wearables, AR glasses and, now, home connectivity.
The in-out strategy is seen as either a series of strategically astute learning experiences to find out what it needs to do to adapt its processors to new end markets, or as a series of failed attempts at entering markets where it has to compete without the protection of a dominant architectural position.
The next division which ex-CFO, now CEO, Bob Swan (pictured), is said to be eyeing up for scrutiny is the memory business where there have been hints that it is contemplating a jv.
China would clearly be first in the queue to secure a memory jv with Intel, and Intel has had a chip jv with China before – with Tsinghua Unigroup.
Unigroup, via its subsidiary Yangtze Memory, is in the NAND memory business where Intel operates but about two generations below the leading edge.
But, while Unigroup would obviously go hard for a memory jv with Intel, the White House would almost certainly veto it. Which leaves only Micron, with which Intel has only recently broken off a jv, Samsung and Hynix.
