Depending on whose forecast you believe, the world will be buying a billion cellular terminals in 2004 (or is it 2005?), up from l999's 400 million units. Only a few chip makers can ship in volumes approaching those numbers and, with its planned new factories, Intel aims to be one of them. A very big one.

TI, with some 60 percent of the cell phone baseband chip market, has been pushing its dual-core RISC/DSP Omap (for Open Multimedia Applications Platform) chip for that market, while Intel has introduced its RISC/DSP Personal Internet Client Architecture (PCA) to also address the same market.

Intel doesn't see PCA as a baseband chip initiative but as a tiny Pentium based on XScale with a DSP core hanging off it. Intel is encouraging traditional PC and PDA software houses to port their C-language programs to XScale and Intel will take care of the nasty assembly-language DSP chores. This approach allows Intel to get an early following for a product that doesn't yet exist, since the faithful can begin programming on the existing Intel StrongARM chip and later port the code to XScale when it begins to ship, and even later on to a yet-to-be-named chip based on the PCA combo architecture.

TI, on the other hand, is already shipping Omap chips, complete with development boards and software consisting of not only a C-language compiler but also a robust graphical DSP software development package.

TI sees its offering as a unified approach to DSP and RISC using one development package that employs its proprietary DSP BIOS as the unifying logic between its C55x DSP core and the ARM9 core on the same die.

This approach is like a warm blanket to the DSP gurus (they are algorithmists or software engineers, not programmers), but there is an order of magnitude greater number of C-language programmers, most of whom haven't a clue what DSP is. Many such programmers see it as a subroutine call to code that somebody else wrote, and Intel seems to nurture that view with its PCA approach.

Will Strauss, an Industry Analyst and President of Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.), can be reached via e-mail at wis@fwdconcepts.com.