Intel becoming a mobile silicon power

Intel hasn’t been able to crack the mobile applications processor business, but it’s come a long way in mobile baseband chips—thanks to its acquisition of Infineon (Unfiltered: Intel buys Infineon, delving deeper into wireless). Intel ranked No. 2 in device baseband revenue in Q1 with $529 million in revenues, though its 15% market share was still far behind market leader Qualcomm’s 42% share and $1.5 billion in revenues, according to new data from Strategy Analytics.

“Intel’s cellular baseband revenue more than doubled in Q1 2011 on the strength of strong design-win momentum with tier-one handset manufacturers,” Senior Analyst Sravan Kundojjala said in a statement. “Despite the latest MeeGo setback, Nokia continues to be an important baseband customer for Intel in terms of volume. However, Intel is noticeably absent in Nokia’s 3G baseband supplier list which is both a threat and a potential opportunity for Intel.”

In 2010, Infineon was ranked 4th among all the baseband vendors, but Strategy Analytics believes it made huge gains in the last half of the year, bringing it to its current ranking below Qualcomm. Meanwhile Qualcomm, not only remained comfortably atop the baseband pyramid, it continued to distance itself from the competition in the fast-growing applications processor space. After knocking Texas Instruments from the top slot in Q4 of 2010, Qualcomm is now the breakaway leader in the market, its Snapdragon processors (CP: Qualcomm revs up Snapdragon) accounting for 44% of the market and $785 million in revenues in Q1.

Meanwhile TI’s fortunes continue to suffer. Its OMAP processors (CP: New TI processor bridging smartphone, computing) fell to third place, with Samsung’s app processor just edging them out. Nvidia attracts a lot of attention for its Tegra processors, which have found their way into some high-profile devices and smartphones. But while Nvidia (Unfiltered: Nvidia completes Quad-fecta) made it into the top five, its 2.1% market share and $35 million in revenues were miniscule compared with Qualcomm, Samsung and TI.

In all, the app processor market grew 108% year-over-year, according to Strategy Analytics. The much more mature baseband market still enjoyed healthy year-over-year growth of 20%.