Intel Centrino in 2007: A New "Platform" Strategy for Growth

Creating Centrino required Intel to make major changes to its strategy and organization. The development of Centrino was part of Intel’s “right hand turn” toward increased performance measures, including improvements coming from increased power efficiencies and away from maximizing processor clock speed. This strategic shift, together with the introduction of new multi-core architectures, fundamentally changed the company’s definition of success for the future. It was a dramatic move forced on the company, in part, by physics and changing industry and competitive forces; but also made possible, in part, by a radically innovative microprocessor architecture developed by its scrappy, geographically distant microprocessor design center in Israel.