Intel chief executive Craig Barrett last week outlined the breadth of his company's ambitions in mobile communications and promised a continuation of Moore's Law - an ongoing reduction in the price of processing power - for its mainstay microprocessor business.

The chip giant's R&D spending across devices is likely to make it the most important building-block provider in technology over the next few years, according to experts. Barrett told the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conference in San Jose, California last week that he saw a huge role for his firm in providing core components for advanced mobile phones.

At the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, running concurrently with IDF, Intel said Korean phone maker Maxon is the first firm to publicly commit to Intel's XScale PXA800F, formerly codenamed Manitoba, a combination package that unifies wireless communications, data processing and base memory. Maxon will use the PXA800F in the MX-E20 camera-phone, due this year, which will feature both an inner and outer colour screen, as well as a video playback capability.

"We've been talking for more than a year about entry into the volume cellphone market," Barrett said. "[Phones are becoming] more data- and compute-intensive, so integration of broadband, compute and base memory makes all the sense in the world."

Barrett also hosted demonstrations of various concept designs including Newport, a transportable PC that can shed its keyboard to act as a Tablet PC. It sports an external LCD display so users can quickly send emails without opening the case.

Another concept shown was Marble Falls, a PC that supports dual independent graphics output so two screens could, for example, show a video editing command console and changes to a video file side by side. Marble Falls also supports a successor to the PC Card format called New Card, and PCI Express, the new bus that is expected to feature on PCs late this year.

Illustrating Intel's reach, Barrett also showed a Portable Media Player, and life-sciences research from Cornell University running on a 16-way Unisys Orion server with the Madison chip, the next version of the Itanium 2 with large cache capacities, due in the middle of this year.

Barrett dismissed the idea that Moore's Law - which states that the number of transistors packed onto processors will double every 18 months - is running out of steam. "There's a lot of ledge left on the technology," he said. "People who write about the end of Moore's Law are going to have lots of work because in 20 years they'll be rehashing the same articles they're writing now."

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