In an interview with Reuters, Krzanich says he has fine-tuned the company’s supply chain in order to meet an anticipated demand for tablets. “We will start to see more and more of our capacity and our output go to things that are mobile, like phones and tablets and other devices,” he tells the global newswire.

Indeed, when the man responsible for Intel’s massive global chip-manufacturing operation speaks, he does so with the authority of a company that tracks the pulse of demand for chips obsessively, so he doesn’t make so public a statement lightly.

Yet the basic competitive problem remains. While Intel still dominates the roughly 300-million-unit-per-year market for PC microprocessors, it has struggled to compete against chips based on designs from the British chip designer ARM, which power most of the world’s smartphones and tablets — including, not insignificantly, the iPad. And while Intel’s lower-power Medfield-generation chip has landed in designs from Lenovo and Motorola Mobility, the wins are seen as progress in a race in which it was already well behind the leader.

Perhaps more interesting is how Reuters casually refers to Krzanich as a candidate to succeed CEO Paul Otellini. Intel shook up its management ranks in January, and promoted Krzanich to COO. Covering Intel includes paying attention to a constant drumbeat of speculation about who the next boss is going to be. Otellini is 61, and the company’s mandatory retirement age is 65, so the succession race, and the perennial handicapping chatter that goes with it, will be something of a marathon.

Krzanich would be a logical successor, mainly because most Intel CEOs become COO first, including both Otellini and his predecessor Craig Barrett. Yet there’s still one rival who bears continued attention: Sean Maloney, the English-born current head of Intel China, had been widely seen as the leading contender before suffering a stroke two years ago. However, people who know him say his recovery is remarkable.

I noted Maloney’s return to competitive rowing last year. A September profile of Maloney in Fortune had more to say on that subject. While he has largely recovered physically, the main lingering effect of the stroke has been on his speech. If he can get close to sounding as he did before the stroke, we may have a real horse race on our hands.

I’ve interviewed him a few times over the years, and grown to like him mainly because he’s a straight shooter, and tells you exactly what he’s thinking, even if he annoys his PR handlers by wandering off message a bit to get his point across. His most recent job was executive vice president of Intel’s Architecture Group.

When he suffered a stroke early last year and went on medical leave to recover, I naturally thought he might be out of contention. Handicapping the CEO succession question is one of the perennial and more cynical subjects occupying the minds of reporters who cover Intel. People who have strokes often recover physically but struggle with speech the rest of their lives, and being CEO of Intel requires a great deal of public speaking. I hoped my assumptions were wrong.

On a visit to Intel late last year, over lunch I asked around informally about Maloney. Naturally the folks there were careful to guard his privacy, but I came away with one key clue: Sean is rowing again. I didn’t know Sean so well as to be aware of his passion for rowing, but once I knew the backstory, I made note of it for later. It seemed pretty important.

Yesterday Intel named Maloney to a new position, chairman of Intel China. The creation of such a position says a lot about Intel’s belief in that country as an overwhelmingly important market not only for PCs and servers but for the smartphones and mobile devices for which Intel badly wants to sell chips. It also says a lot about how far Maloney has come back.

Yet I didn’t see any evidence in yesterday’s coverage that anyone had interviewed Maloney. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy described him to The Wall Street Journal’s Don Clark as “mentally and physically back to normal and doing very well.” I wanted to hear it from Maloney himself.

Remembering the tip about rowing, I thought there might be some gossip or anecdotes about him on the water, or evidence that he’s been competing in rowing events. What I found was the video below, shot in February of this year. In it, Maloney talks about how a doctor said he’d never row again. Determined to prove him wrong, and at that point unable to speak well enough to argue the point, he got someone to take him down to the docks and just started rowing, in circles at first because he had no use of his right arm. It was a start, but what a start. Maloney went on to compete in October in the Head of the Charles Regatta, a major rowing event in Boston. (You can see his finish here.) He didn’t win the race, but he sure won that argument with the doctor.

So if you were looking for any evidence of how well Maloney is doing since his stroke, look no further than this video where he speaks for himself. It’s pretty inspiring.

The 25 newcomers shown off include Intel’s (INTC) Core i3 and i5 processors, the former rated at 2.93 and 3.06 gigahertz, the latter at 3.2GHz. Also, talked up at the event: Intel’s new Turbo Boost technology, which allows processors to substantially increase clock speed as high-bandwidth applications come online.

“Turbo is something we’re very proud of,” Sean Maloney, executive VP of the Intel Architecture Group said during the event. “It’s the first time in the mainstream computer industry that we’re dynamically changing the frequency based on the workload.”

An impressive showing for Intel, which is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results next week. And a nasty blow to rival AMD (AMD), whose 32-nanometer chips won’t arrive at market until 2011.

The chip giant is expected to use the Computex trade show this week to discuss a category of portables that fall in a price band between netbooks–which can start at less than $300–and full-featured notebooks, which often cost more than $1,000. Price is not the only distinguishing feature; these ‘tweener portables also will be touted as sleek and stylish–think of Apple’s MacBook Air, but with a starting price of $600 to $700 instead of $1,799.

“Thin is in,” summed up Sean Maloney, Intel’s top salesman, during a speech to analysts in May that provided a sneak preview of the strategy. He predicted a steep sales ramp for the new category, which he labeled on one slide as “ultra-thin affordable.” Just to confuse things, many analysts refer to the niche as CULV, which stands for “consumer ultra-low voltage.” (Instead of Intel’s Atom–a microprocessor used in most netbooks that starts at a list price of $29–the new systems are expected to be based on price-reduced versions of its Core 2 design, which now starts at $113 and up).

Read the rest of this post on the original site

When attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, BoomTown moderated what turned out to be a fascinating panel discourse of what was to come in the tech sector.

No, it was not a gathering of Trekkies.

The CES SuperSession panel, titled “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025,” was less Jules Verne than a logical analysis of where gadgetry is headed by looking at both the past and the present.

Overall consensus: Touch screens everywhere, 3-D imaging in wide use, no device wires, ubiquitous high-speed wireless networks and more.

Of course, there were some edgier ideas, like being able to tell exactly when it is going to rain to the minute, via massive computing of weather patterns.

In addition, one of the panelists, Greg Harper, brought back what was popular in 1994, the same number of years back that 2025 is forward. Yep, he dragged out for display the Apple (AAPL) Newton and brick-sized cellphones.

The panelists were: Stephen DiFranco, VP and GM, Americas Consumer Group, Lenovo; Gregory Harper, co-founder, Gadgetoff and president, Cerberus; Len J. Lauer, EVP and COO, Qualcomm (QCOM); Sean Maloney, EVP and GM, Sales and Marketing, Intel (INTC); and Phil McKinney, VP and CTO, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packward (HPQ).

Here’s the video with interviews about 2025 with all of them–and don’t miss the very funny poster at the end from Microsoft (MSFT) about its vision of the future: