Despite comparatively poor sales last year, a difficult first quarter this year, and doubts about the Pentium 4's performance compared to AMD's Athlon, Paul Otellini, head of Intel's Architecture Group, says there are no problems for the company.

In a meeting held in London recently Otellini was asked about the drop in sales and the fact that president and chief executive Craig Barrat had predicted sales of 20 million Pentium 4s by the end of the year which turned out to total only one million by the end of May.

"We have a range inside the company that we're comfortable to be in," said Otellini. In regard to recalled motherboards and chipsets last year, he said that Intel "didn't pay enough attention to some very basic programming techniques for a while" but had addressed the issue.

Otellini was optimistic about the future, predicting that overall computing sales would increase tenfold within 10 to 15 years, creating an $8tn industry.

"We are spending record amounts of money on research and development to do this and achieve the growth," he said.