Intel will ship a billion chips a year within five years

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini predicted today that the company will be shipping a billion chips a year within the next five years. On top of that, revenues and profits are expected to grow at low double-digit rates, or more than double the rate of the past five years.

Otellini made the prediction at the company’s analyst meeting in Santa Clara. He said that he expects the computing market to have a 15 percent to 16 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years.

Otellini said that the growth will happen on a variety of fronts. Desktops computers will grow a mere 2.4 percent CAGR through 2014. But laptops will grow 22 percent, netbooks will grow 15 percent, and tablet computers will grow 73 percent to 88 percent.

Confirming a view that we wrote about in our story of the rise of vertically organized companies, Otellini pointed out that Intel isn’t just a chip company. It has layers of business on top of that, including hardware platforms, software, and services. About 22 percent of Intel’s employees are software programmers.

“Intel is transforming into a computing company,” Otellini said. “Don’t think of it as a chip company. It’s easy to look at Apple and Google and see they are growing. But Intel has a unique set of attributes that no one can replicate.”