Hey iPhone, Meet a Tiny Chip With Superpowers.
I can distinctly remember the day when Intel Corp. launched the Pentium processor. It was the day the desktop computing changed for me and for a lot of others. It was also the day when Intel started to put a gap between itself and all its wannabe processor rivals.
Context & Ripple Effects
This column arrives at a deliberate inflection point in Intel's own narrative. The company had already been recast once around a new kind of leader: Om Malik's 2006 Newsweek profile caught Intel mid-pivot under Paul Otellini, and a 2007 New York Times piece credited the unnamed component-level engineers — not the marketers — with the products that actually moved the industry.
Against that backdrop, the Pentium analogy is doing real work here: GigaOM is arguing that the tiny chip being pitched toward the iPhone could be for handheld computing what the Pentium was for the desktop — the moment Intel stops chasing the mobile market and starts defining it, opening the same durable gap it opened over its 'wannabe' rivals in PCs.
First-order effects
- Intel is positioning its low-power silicon directly against the processor inside Apple's iPhone, making Apple's in-house chip the benchmark any credible mobile part has to beat.
- The explicit Pentium framing sets the bar Intel itself is claiming: a mobile product good enough to separate Intel from the rest of the handset-chip field, just as the Pentium did on the desktop.
Second-order effects
- A credible Intel entry gives handset makers a second sourcing option, resetting pricing and roadmap leverage against the incumbent suppliers whose parts currently ship in phones.
- Rivals whose silicon roadmaps lack Intel's manufacturing scale get forced into competing on integration and power efficiency rather than raw process leadership.
Third-order effects
- If the Pentium pattern repeats, competitive advantage in phones shifts further toward whoever controls the leading processor roadmap, complementing rather than replacing industrial design as the differentiator.
- Handset silicon supply would tend to consolidate around one or two pace-setting vendors, reproducing the winner-take-most structure Intel created in desktop processors.
The trend: The smartphone is displacing the desktop PC as the arena where processor leadership gets decided, and Intel's mobile push is the test of whether its desktop playbook transfers.