Intel's Barrett Looks To Nontraditional Markets

That includes moving more decisively into developing countries outside the United States, which now accounts for about 30 percent of its sales; driving hard into the burgeoning digital home; tapping the telecommunications sectors interest in open systems infrastructure; riding momentum in the business server space; and making a concerted effort to build share in the cellular handset market.

"I think we're poised to grow in every dimension," Barrett told financial analysts Thursday in New York.

To illustrate some of the market potential, Barrett pointed to the $28 billion wireless handset space, of which Intel has about an 8 percent share due to "spillover."

Intel executives stopped short of signaling the arrival of a major upgrade cycle for the commercial maket, saying most companies are investing in new systems only as needed to boost productivity.

Central to Intel's growth efforts in 2004 will be the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's ongoing efforts to integrate technology that addresses both communications and computing functions. That thinking was behind the release last March of the Centrino mobile platform, which has generated an estimated $2 billion in revenue for the company since the launch, said Intel President and COO Paul Otellini.

Among the architectural enhancement efforts Otellini discussed during the meeting was Tiano, a project focused on building features for better recovery and management into the BIOS. Otellini said BIOS manufacturers can license Intel's software to incude it with their firmware, although he provided no timeframes for its availability.

A factor in Intel's push into the digital home will be the Grantsdale chipset, which will provide "soft" wireless access point capabilities to consumer PCs, Otellini said.