LONDON — Craig Barrett, president and chief executive officer of Intel Corp., emphasized the importance of the StrongARM processor architecture to Intel this week and said it would be used to address two of the company's three target markets.

"We have processor families targeted at particular markets," said Barrett, speaking in a press conference after an hour-long presentation to U.K. business executives. "We'll use StrongARM for two out of three -- handheld computing and consumer electronics." The PC will remain the domain of the Intel's 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessor architectures, he said.

Intel acquired two initial StrongARM designs and related intellectual property along with most of the semiconductor operations of Digital Equipment Corp. in April of this year. Digital had developed the StrongARM SA1 core and two chips, SA110 and SA1500, based on a license obtained from ARM Ltd. (Cambridge, England).

Barrett emphasized the importance of the Bluetooth project in his presentation. Founded by Intel along with Ericsson, Nokia, IBM and Toshiba, Bluetooth is being developed to provide inexpensive wireless communications between mobile computers, handheld computers and smartphones. Amplifying his comments afterward, Barrett said that Intel would develop StrongARM processors for Bluetooth-enabled equipment. "I think you'll see StrongARM in a few spaces -- set-top boxes, handhelds and consumer electronics, and possibly as an I/O processor."

Barrett said that StrongARM was being developed along the lines of other Intel processor families with multiple design groups working in parallel with staggered deadlines. "Two [StrongARM] architecture groups have been formed and are working on the architecture, and existing StrongARM chips are going into designs now. You'll see a new generation of StrongARM coming out every year from now on," he said.

But Barrett did not feel there would be demand for Intel to sell StrongARM chips for use in Windows terminals, otherwise known as thin-clients or network computers.

"I think the public has given its answer on network terminals. Everyone but Larry Ellison [chairman of Oracle Corp.] has heard the answer," Barrett said.