QUALCOMM, Inc. (QCOM) – Intel Corporation (INTC)’s Quark Quandary: Can Something so Small Fuel Big Growth?

The power of security
Don’t expect Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) to get caught up in a price battle in commodity chips. The company’s legacy is about innovation and offering something better to its customers. And as even more things become connected, the “something better” that Intel can bring is its security. From EETimes:

Last week, HVAC giant Daikin got one industrial reference board using a Quark chip and including WiFi and 3G support. Kevin Facinelli, executive vice president for operations at the company, dialed into the board from the IDF event here to show it is working. “We looked at Freescale and ARM too but decided on using Quark,” Facinelli said. The mechanical engineering company was not concerned about relative silicon performance. It just wanted to offer a remote maintenance capability with high security. Security software gave Intel the edge over ARM. The Quark reference board runs a stack of white-listed Wind River embedded operating system supplemented with McAfee security software, the kind of embedded system stack Intel has been touting for embedded systems for more than a year.

Intel’s 2010 acquisition of McAfee will pay dividends as the Internet of things becomes more pervasive, and chip-level security for purpose-built devices become both more common and more powerful. A future where a terrorist attack could be as simple as hacking into tens of thousands of HVAC controllers to overload the grid isn’t much farther from reality than swallowable computer medicine.

Final thoughts
The Atom chip will still be very central to Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s attempts to stem the losses from desktop computing, and return to growth. Mobile will remain integral to Intel’s plans moving forward. With that said, don’t ignore the potential of something even smaller playing a role in the company’s future as the Internet of things continues to grow.

The article Intel’s Quark Quandary: Can Something so Small Fuel Big Growth? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Jason Hall.

Jason Hall owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of Intel and Qualcomm.

Copyright © 1995 – 2013 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.