LONDON — Intel Corp. covets the $1.3 billion cellphone application processor market for its future versions of Atom, according to Will Strauss, president and principal analyst at Forward Concepts, in a soon-to-be-published report on the handsets and chip market.

The stand-alone cellphone applications processor market is growing and last year, according to Strauss, was dominated by TI and its OMAP family (43 percent share) followed by Samsung (17.4 percent) and Marvell (17.1 percent).

Other players include ST-Ericsson, which is said to have taken a 9.4 percent share last year, followed by Toshiba (6.1 percent) and Zoran, Renesas, Freescale and Nvidia, all with less than a 5 percent stake.

Forward Concepts believes Marvell shipped more apps processor units, while Samsung had slightly higher ASPs.

Marvells products, of course, are based on the ARM-heritage XScale solutions that were acquired from Intel. Now, Strauss notes, Intel would like to see Atom products in that earlier-vacated market space.