Intel’s push into the smartphone microprocessor market will happen next year and will be driven by the company’s progress in 32 nanometer technology, says Intel CFO Stacey Smith. According to the Financial Times, which spoke with Smith at a developer forum in San Francisco last week, 32nm will allow Intel to drive its ‘Atom’ smartphone processor into the high-volume, low-price mobile market. According to Smith, each wafer will be able to produce 2,400 to 2,500 die, or 400 to 500 percent more than the existing technology. He adds that discussions with handset makers are already underway, though devices will not hit the market until the very end of 2009, or more likely, early 2010. FT reports that Intel projected at the conference that sales of Atom-powered devices would reach 200 million by 2012, compared to 300 million for traditional notebooks.

Meanwhile, Nvidia – one of Intel’s principal competitors in the smartphone microprocessor market – has also hinted at future plans, reports PC Pro. Speaking at the NVISION expo in San Jose, California, Nvidia President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said: “Our strategy is to completely focus on smartphones. We believe the mobile device will become the next personal computer… Smartphones will become a computer first and a phone second. In the next several years we’ll realise that we’ve gone through a second PC revolution.” According to PC Pro, Huang said Nvidia would be “completely focused on Windows Mobile” and is committed to using VIA’s Nano CPU, a rival to Intel’s Atom.