Mobile Gadgets Fuel Chip Sales

And many of the most important benefits of Intel's new low-power processor, such as integrated graphics, video and memory, as well as robust voice communications capabilities, won't appear until the second generation of the chip arrives in 2009 or 2010.

Fortunately for Intel, the PC market is providing plenty of near-term business, with the demand for notebooks showing no signs of cooling off.

In 2007, notebook PCs out-shipped desktops for the first time in the U.S. As that trend spreads to other regions of the world in the coming years, companies whose chips cater to portable PCs will enjoy a nice tailwind. More notebooks, for instance, means more wireless networking chips of the kind made by Atheros, Marvell Technology Group(MRVL Quote) and Broadcom.

The notebook boom is also good news for the top PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard(HPQ Quote), Dell(DELL Quote) and Acer, which are likely to consolidate their share of the worldwide PC market.

That's because notebooks are not easily snapped together from off-the-shelf components, as is the case with desktop PCs. As a result, smaller PC vendors that sell lesser-brand-name notebooks are at a competitive disadvantage because they lack the big firms' design and engineering resources.

"It becomes a little harder to have smaller players in the notebook market," says Gartner analyst George Shiffler.