In a wide-ranging conversation with New York Times editors and reporters Wednesday, Intel’s chief executive, Paul Otellini, explained the grand plan behind the chip maker’s new Atom microprocessor, took a gentlemanly swipe at Apple’s iPhone and called on the next president to commit $25 billion to alternative fuel programs to liberate the economy from imported oil and “reinvigorate math and science” education in America.

Audio In a recent interview with The New York Times, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini discussed the company’s approach to globalization. Listen to the excerpt: (mp3)

The low-cost Atom processor, Mr. Otellini said, is Intel’s bid to supply the processing engines that will help vastly expand the reach of the Internet beyond personal computers. He noted “four big new markets for our products” that will total $10 billion over the next few years. The four, he said, were consumer electronics, cellphones, embedded controllers and low-cost computing. The last market includes so-called mobile Internet devices — larger than a cellphone but smaller than a notebook PC — and next-generation laptops called Netbooks, priced below $300.

Audio Mr. Otellini on Intel’s new plant in China: (mp3)

Intel has struggled in the smaller-than-PC computing market in the past. In cell-phone chips, the leader is ARM Holdings, a British company that licenses its technology to many companies. (See Bits’ recent interview with ARM’s chief executive.)

How will Intel fare against the ARM camp in these fast-growing, Internet-fueled markets? “I see this as a race to some extent,” Mr. Otellini said. For Intel, he said, the challenge is “how fast can we shrink down to the smaller form factors” while retaining the company’s prowess in computing and full Internet connectivity.

Audio Mr. Otellini on the new challenge of programming tomorrow’s many-core processors: (mp3)

The hurdles facing ARM licensees like Nokia, NXP Semiconductors and Samsung are high, according to Mr. Otellini. They are coming at the problem from the cell-phone world, adding computing capability and performance to their chips. That, he said, “pushes them to more advanced chip technology, which typically they don’t have access to. They are a generation or two behind.”

Their biggest problem, said Mr. Otellini: “They then have to create a software ecosystem with a common programming model. Or you are going to reprogram the Internet, application vendor by application vendor, to the specific version of ARM.”

Audio Mr. Otellini on the silver-lining opportunity presented by the surge in oil prices: (mp3)

Even ARM chip users, such as Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, have to deal with that issue. “The iPhone is not a full Internet machine,” Mr. Otellini said. “You go where Steve lets you go because they’ve done the transcoding.” Not all of YouTube is accessible, he said, nor is Flash- or Adobe-produced Web content, though he noted that Apple has done an excellent job on this newspaper’s Web site.

The solution, in Mr. Otellini’s view, is streamline the Intel architecture — through its Atom products — to “take the openness of the notebook down to the price point of the cell phone.”