Intel's Push on Mobile Market Continues with New Acquisition

It seems that the latest episode in Intel's struggle to gain a foothold on the mobile market has taken the form of a new acquisition, that of Silicon Hive, a private company based in the Netherlands.

For quite some time, Intel has been seeking better means of entering the mobile electronics market, which is solidly dominated by the ARM architecture.

This is an effort that more or less mirrors ARM's own push to take away some of Intel's own share, although on the server and PC markets.

Both companies have been taking steps towards their goals, although little results have, so far, been achieved.

In order to speed up its entry into the mobile front, Intel has now decided to acquire a spin-off of Philips Electronics.

The company in question bears the name of Silicon Hive and is a private firm which specializes in the development of system-on-chip products (SoCs).

Since the Santa Clara, California-based CPU and chipset maker is relying on its Atom processors in its efforts, one can only assume that the Silicon Hive team will be tasked with improving their multimedia capabilities (imaging and video).

In other words, Intel wants to make sure that the Atom is multimedia-capable even while driving its power consumption as low as possible.

The financial implications of the deal were not disclosed, but whatever sum is exchanged probably won't be that large, seeing as how Silicon hive has just over 65 employees in total.

What remains to be seen is how soon Intel manages to make new and improved CE, embedded and mobile platforms.

Either way, if its incursion into these areas is to turn out profitable, whatever SoCs are created will have to successfully challenge the likes of Qualcomm Adreno, NVIDIA Tegra 2 (and Tegra 3, since Kal-El will come out soon enough), and PowerVR chips.