Before 1991, only a few computer aficionados cared which company made the micro­processors inside their PCs, or how fast those processors ran. But then came "Intel Inside," the chip maker's ingenious campaign to mar­ket directly to consumers. The adver­tising crusade not only trained PC buyers to look for the Intel sticker on new desktops and laptops; it made them feel old-fashioned if they didn't have the latest, fastest edition in the 486 or Pentium ­series of chips. And Intel prospered, cementing its lead over rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices. An impressive 82 percent of PCs shipped globally in the third quarter of 2004 contained Intel ­microprocessors.

But computing is changing in ways that are forcing the company to stretch beyond its traditional talent for making and marketing faster and faster microprocessors. For one thing, there's a ceiling on the number of transistors that can work side by side on a single chip without overheating, and Intel and its competitors are already banging up against it. That's leading to more efficient designs that use multiple processors and get tasks done faster by breaking them up, rather than by making each processor do more operations per second. At the same time, people are taking advantage of innovations like wireless broadband to use their computers in new ways. If your laptop's main function is to keep you in touch with the office from any airport lounge or conference hall, you'd probably prefer an energy-efficient processor that gives you an extra hour of battery life to one that can run your Power­Point animations faster.