Next Intel bundle frontier: Home

Intel wants to repeat the Centrino experience in the living room.

"Digital home is probably the next place," where Intel will create a Centrino-like brand and product bundles as part of its new so-called platform strategy, Anand Chandrasekher, the new director of sales and marketing for Intel, said during a brief interview at the launch of a new version of Centrino, code-named Sonoma, in San Francisco.

For most of its history, Intel largely sold its products individually. PC manufacturers could qualify for larger-volume discounts if they purchased the company's chipsets along with its processors, but these products were generally looked at as separate items.

With Centrino, Intel bundled three chips--a Pentium M processor, a chipset and a Wi-Fi receiver--into a package and provided additional compatibility testing.

The plan apparently worked. Considerably more than half of the Pentium M laptops come with the full Centrino bundle. In just about two years, Intel has garnered about $5 billion in revenue from Centrino. The world's population of notebooks is expected to double from 2004 to 2008.

Centrino also paved the way for Intel to boost its revenue from communication chips, a market it had tried to penetrate for years with only middling success.

Earlier this week, Intel unfurled a broad reorganization to promote unified product plans for particular markets, such as health care or the home. Under the reorganization, Chandrasekher moved from running the notebook division to overseeing sales for the company and helping run marketing with Eric Kim, who came over from Samsung.

Although Intel has not fleshed out its plans for consumer electronics, executives have already said it is developing Pentium chip derivatives for home electronics. Communication chips will also be part of the effort.

"You will see a big push in communications across the board," Chandrasekher said.

Elsewhere at the Sonoma launch, Intel execs stated that notebooks