The name that popped out many times on our recent trip to the US and as you could have guessed the main competitor for both Intel and Nvidia is now Qualcomm.

Qualcomm has swept across the US smartphone market due to its dominance with LTE integrated SOC and Intel and Nvidia want a piece of that market. Right now AMD looks quite weak in its eternal fight against Intel and the Core architecture dominates the PC and especially notebook market, the fight goes down to tablets and phones.

Intel wants to get into many Windows 8 and eventually Android tablets as well as phones. Qualcomm is in the way and it currently looks really strong in these markets. The key to success is LTE as well as low power chips and Intel is getting better and better in this market with each generation.

It is finally starting to get important phone design wins, such as Motorola, and with Windows 8 we will see many tablets based on Intel Atom Clover Trail chips. Don’t forget the new category started by Asus that everyone now calls convertibles, which is basically an Asus transformer or – insert brand here — transformer, basically a convertible tablet or a tablet with a keyboard dock.

We saw Dell and HP making these machines with Windows 8 that will hit the market in late October as soon as Windows 8 goes public. The big fight will be Intel versus the rest of the ARM market. Qualcomm and to some extent Nvidia are key targets and the showdown is about to start in roughly a month.