Qualcomm was the chipmaker of choice for some of the highest-profile tech gadgets unveiled the week of the Consumer Electronics Show — in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Not only do Qualcomm chips run the Google Nexus One smartphone introduced in Mountain View, Calif., on Jan. 5, but they’re also under the hood of computers shown off at CES by Hewlett-Packard. HP and Lenovo are working on smartbooks, scaled-down personal computers, based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor.
By getting its chips into a broader range of consumer electronics, San Diego-based Qualcomm is poised to compete head-on with Intel, the world’s No. 1 maker of semiconductors for computers. “Intel and Qualcomm are on a collision course,” says Flint Pulskamp, an analyst at technology research firm IDC.
Nowhere was that more clear than at CES, where for the first time a Qualcomm executive delivered a keynote speech. For years, Qualcomm has devised chips that help cell phones function as minicomputers, Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs said in his Jan. 8 address. “Those chips are now going into the consumer electronics devices themselves,” Jacobs said a day after Paul Otellini, his counterpart at Intel, touted his own company’s foray into chips for mobile phones. In the first half of the year, Intel will start shipping Moorestown, a smartphone processor, Otellini said on Jan. 7.
Qualcomm, the world’s largest maker of chips for cell phones, expects its Snapdragon processor to be used in more than 40 devices from 17 manufacturers, a sign that the company is bridging the performance gap between chips that run cell phones and those needed for bigger, more demanding machines previously powered by Intel semiconductors. “Over the last two or three years the partners that we deal with are new,” says Steve Mollenkopf, a Qualcomm executive vice-president and head of its CDMA unit, in an…