Rui Wang, SVP of Intel Corporation and chair of Intel China said that she expects to see mainland Chinese enterprises in the CPU space become Intel's competitors in the next 3-5 years, during an interview with local media Guancha.cn.

"So far there has not been any local companies that are able to deal a substantial threat to Intel," said Wang. "But in 3-5 years, it will become clear that local companies will emerge as strong rivals." China contributes more than 25% of Intel's revenues.

At present, local CPUs in China can be divided into three camps: Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor and Hygon, which adopt the X86 core licensing model; Huawei's HiSilicon Kunpeng CPU and Phytium Technology in Tianjin, which adopt the ARM instruction set architecture licensing and self-designed CPU cores; and Loongson and Sunway Microelectronic, which develop their own instruction set architecture and IP cores. These three routes show a low to a high degree of independent control, but the ecological maturity is just the opposite, said Guancha.cn.

Wang was confident that Intel's sound Wintel ecosystem is not easy to beat. Although she hopes there will be local companies to compete with Intel in China, "Intel won't be polite, and will exert its power to compete fairly."