Paul Otellini, general manager of Intel's architecture business group, paid a whistle-stop visit to London today and outlined the company's business strategy. He also mentioned a new product which comes out next week which we're not allowed to talk about. So go here to find out about the 550MHz Pentium III. Otellini said: "Two years ago, we realised how important the Internet would be. We were looking for the new killer application. It appeared underneath us and it was the Internet." He said Intel's transition from the Pentium II to the Pentium III would be the fastest ever. "Very soon we'll have .18 micron on the Pentium III for both desktops and mobiles and that will give us economies of cost and speed," he said. He said that the Intel architecture will be the premier method of accessing the Internet. Although Intel is committed to developing the StrongARM platform, he said no one was entirely sure how successful the so-called appliance market would be. "It could be a zero billion dollar business," he said. He said that Intel had not yet had a chance to look at AMD's K7. "We look at every product competitively," he said. "Intel's major goal is typically to displace our own products and to bring out new products that better the old ones," he said. On Intel's pricing on the Celeron processor this year, he said: "We'll be as competitive as we need to be at the low end. We've always made money on the Celeron, it's a profitable product for us. You can't sell below cost -- it's illegal in the US. We don't aim to squash anybody, we aim to be competitive." He said Intel was happy with the progress of the IA-64 platform. "We announced the $250 million fund [earlier this week] to work on the next layer of applications for smaller companies that may not have the financial means to port ," he said. "I'm comfortable wthat we'll have enough target applications at the time of the Merced launch," he said. "IA-64 will be faster and more cost effective. We're trying to move to places where IA-32 does not yet reach." ® See also Intel's desktop chip prices Intel's mobile chip prices Intel's server chip prices