Intel apparently hopes to to ship 240 million CPUs this year, making it the world's biggest microprocessor supplier, by revenue.
By volume, however, it's not even in the top five - by that measure Texas Instruments wins hands down with half a dozen other cell phone and embedded processor suppliers fighting it out for second place.
So what, you ask? We're in IT, right? what do we care who makes the CPUs that go into embedded devices and the billion plus cell phones to be sold next year?
I had an eye opener on this the other day. Here's what happened: a guy named Jerry - a former construction superintendent, now running a home inspection service - stopped by to offer some advice and support on getting our new house all set-up and shipshape. During the conversation I asked if he knew a good guy to fix a window problem and what he did was whip out his java enabled cell phone, click a few buttons, and tell me to who to call.
I've got a similar function set up as a csh alias on my workstation, and I know there's lots of PC software for this kind of thing, but when I asked he said he'd pretty much abandoned his PC because it was too much of a nuisance - the cell phone does most of what he wants, and what it doesn't do a pencil and paper will.
He doesn't like the small buttons, and squints a bit at the screen, but as he put it the things can't be beat for overall convenience - and this is a guy in his sixties who's used to being in control of multi-million dollar construction sites.
Ten years ago he was part of the business PC market, five years ago he bought one for his own use; but now he just uses a cell phone: good news for TI and Freescale, bad news for Intel. There's a wall there, and if he's any indication the PC phenomenon is hitting it as we speak.