Intel Corporation held an analyst meeting yesterday in New York to discuss the company’s current activities as well as future plans and expectations. The company indicated its consistent intention to provide not only central processing units for personal computers, but to enable the whole IT infrastructure with its silicon technologies.

“We are still involved with processors, we always have been and we always will be, but beyond the processor we are doing quite a lot of work,” said Intel’s President Paul Otellini, quoted by CBS MarketWatch.

As reported yesterday, Centrino appears to be a big deal not only for Intel Corporation of Santa Clara, California, but for the whole industry. Therefore, Intel’s quite natural activity is aggressive penetration in the WLAN market with its products and promoting the Centrino brand. In fact, the success of Centrino has been driving Intel’s revenues up and the company should probably consider this goal to be achieved.

Otellini also said Intel remains on track to reduce its average chip costs by 25% in 2003, in line with an earlier projection. In mid-2003, Intel backed away from this projection, but Otellini said higher volumes now make this a realistic goal.

Even though the majority of high-technology companies indicated the upturn of the industry in the second half of 2003, Intel remains modestly conservative on the matter in short-term (particularly about 2004).

“We are seeing some sprinkling signs of that,” said Intel’s CEO Craig Barrett, quoted by ZDNet. “But I do not expect to see a major upgrade cycle,” he added.

Intel’s job number one for the year 2004 is the ramp of the next-generation Pentium 4 with SSE3 technology processor code-named Prescott. The company expects to ship around 70 million of its new Prescott microprocessors made using 90nm fabrication process. The ramp is expected to be very rapid and shipments of CPUs with Prescott cores inside are projected to account for 60% of all Pentium shipments as well as 40% of all Celeron shipments next year, according to the company. 

Paul Otellini indicated the company’s intention to speed up the Pentium 4 with SSE3 “Prescott” processors to 4.0GHz next year.

Intel promised to continue aggressively penetrating the emerging markets, such as China, but will continue investing in already mature markets, such as the United States of America.