Intel opens China, India design centers

Intel plans to announce the opening of four new design offices on Monday in China, India, Brazil, and Egypt as part of its strategy to build specialized products for emerging markets with different needs than the rest of the computing world.

The company's new Channel Platforms Group will be headquartered in Shanghai, alongside an office that Intel is calling a "platform definition center," said Willy Agatstein, a vice president within the channel group. The other offices will be located in Bangalore, Cairo, and Sao Paulo.

Earlier this year, Intel reorganized the company around the end products that use its lineup of processors and chipsets, creating groups such as the Digital Home Group and the Digital Enterprise Group. One of the groups formed in that shakeup was the Channel Platforms Group, which gives a formal organizational structure to a group that has been in operation for about ten years, Agatstein said.

The Santa Clara, California, company's channel group is tasked with developing products for local markets where the local computing and communications infrastructure does not match up to conditions in established markets in the U.S. and Europe, Agatstein said. At this point, the large cities in China and India already boast fairly sophisticated IT capabilities, but the story is very different in small villages in rural areas, he said.

In those places, PC users are faced with conditions not envisioned by product designers in Silicon Valley. Power supplies are often unreliable or intermittent, and there's "more dust than anyone could imagine," Agatstein said. In these largely agricultural communities, computing resources could help farmers sell their crops or access weather forecasts and help rural residents obtain services from their governments, but standard off-the-shelf PCs aren't always up to the task, he said.

Instead, Intel plans to work with local and global PC vendors to design systems for those users using existing Intel products, Agatstein said. The effort comes out of a previous research project at Intel that produced the China Home Learning PC, a concept design that Intel Chairman Craig Barrett showed off during his January keynote at the International Consumer Electronics Show. The PC comes with a key that parents can use to physically switch the PC between a stripped-down "education" mode and a regular mode.

Other ideas formulated by the group include motherboards for Internet cafe PCs, Agatstein said. Internet cafes are very popular in China and India as gathering places for teenagers and young adults to play games or browse the Internet. Intel has produced a motherboard with hardware and software that makes an Internet cafe PC easier to manage from a central location and more secure against both online intrusions and the theft of peripherals, he said.

Intel plans to hire local workers who know the market to staff its design centers, Agatstein said. The centers will focus on larger geographic areas than just the cities in which they are located. For example, the Sao Paulo center will design products for all of Latin America, and the Cairo center will work on products for the Middle East and Africa, he said.

With PC growth rates expected to slow in the U.S. and Europe over the next five years, PC companies and their processor counterparts are looking to emerging markets as their next source of growth.

Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has launched its own program called "50x15," with the goal of bringing cheap Internet access to half the world's population within the next 15 years. Last year it introduced the Personal Internet Communicator (PIC) as first product for that initiative. The PIC comes with bare-bones components and costs around $249.