Intel's Atom Chip

Since their launch in 2008, Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) Atom microprocessors have dominated the global netbook market. In addition to netbooks, the Atom microprocessor is used in a variety of other places including smartphones, tablets, car infotainment systems, smart TVs, low power consuming servers, and energy management systems.
Despite this, Atom’s rising market share will have minimal impact on Intel’s stock since these ultra low voltage microprocessors account for only around 2% of Intel’s stock price, based on our estimates. Intel’s Atom competes with AMD’s (NYSE:AMD) Athlon Neo, Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM) Snapdragon, and Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) Tegra microprocessors.
In the past, Atom’s market share of the combined netbook and smartphone market has increased from an estimated 8% in 2008 to 13% in 2009 , attributable to the rise in netbook shipments from around 11.4 million in 2008 to 26.5 million in 2009.
Going forward, we expect Atom’s market share to grow as it expands into the competitive smartphone and tablet PC market. Intel has partnered with Nokia to develop an OS named MeeGo, a Linux-based software platform which is compatible with Atom’s x86 architecture and will support a broad range of devices including tablets, mobile computers and media phones.
In its quest to break into the Android-based smartphone market, Intel ported Android to its Atom processor platform in early 2010, paving way for the companies to develop Android-powered smartphones based on Intel’s Atom processor. Despite this, the smartphone market remains dominated by ARM technology-based processor chips.
(Trefis.com)