The tech world is busily crunching Intel’s Q3 results – the gist being that profits and sales are both down, but not by as much as market analysts expected, which in these uncertain times counts for good news. Unsurprisingly, ‘good news’ is the spin being put on things by CEO Paul Otellini, who projected a bullish mood despite a sluggish PC market. So does Intel have good reasons for optimism?

Exhibit A in all these discussions is Windows 8, whose looming launch is to be fuelled by a $1.8 billion marketing offensive, which should be enough money to buy success (though Otellini sensibly points out that “the darn thing hasn’t even launched yet … We’ll know a lot more about this 90 days from now”). The OS has attracted considerable buzz for barely resembling past Windows versions and targeting touchscreen devices over the traditional mouse/keyboard setup. The launch will coincide with those of hundreds of new PCs designed for the system, the majority of which will – of course – ship with Intel CPUs at the center of them.

Only a slimmed-down version is to be available for ARM-based devices, so Intel will be hoping to ride Windows 8 into the tablet market. Here, it has to be said, success is unlikely to come quickly. The fundamental problem is price: even ARM tablets running Windows RT are looking to come in at prices comparable to or north of the iPad, and ‘full’ Windows 8 tablets are expected to be dearer still. Factor in the low price point of Android devices – not to say Amazon’s Kindle Fire range, aggressively discounted to promote other parts of Amazon’s business – competition is stiff. Compatibility issues with desktop x86 software (and friendly relations with Microsoft) may encourage enterprises to lock employees into Windows 8 (therefore Intel) tablets, but even in that case it will be some time before enough businesses have made the switch to the new OS to give Intel its much-coveted foothold in the tablet market.

More realistically, Intel hopes that a new generation of ultrabooks will kick some life into the flagging PC market. The keywords these days are ‘touchscreens’ and ‘convertibles’. Some 40 touchscreen ultrabooks are in the works, and many of them are in weird hybrid form factors. These range from the now well-established ‘detachable tablet’ model, to Lenovo’s Ideapad Yoga, which can contort itself into four different hinge positions, or Dell’s swivel-screen XPS-12. Intel clearly has high hopes for the young Ultrabook standard, hoping that it could become as much a quality guarantee as the Apple logo, not to say a recognisable Intel brand other than that infamous jingle. And, by definition, getting Ultrabooks onto the market means increasing sales of Intel’s top-range Ivy Bridge processors. With mid-market offerings promised for around $700, the ultra-portable format could take back some ground lost to tablets over the last couple of years.

If all else fails, there is the upcoming Haswell chip architecture, which Intel hopes will solve problems across the different computer markets. Pure tablets will benefit from power ratings as low as 10W, and portable devices more generally will have a powerful integrated GPU to play with, and can expect an overall leap in performance. Haswell chips are mooted to be manufacture ready in the first half of next year. Of course, there is a trade-off in the short term. Consumers, possibly already wary of the switch to Windows 8, will wonder if it’s worth spending the best part of $1,000 at least for a current generation tablet or Ultrabook, when a whole new architecture is just over the horizon (and one which promises serious benefits, such as a near doubling of the Ultrabook standard’s battery life to 9 hours).

Otellini wants us to wait and see for 90 days, to see how Windows 8 launches – but it will be a year or more before we have any real clarity as to Intel’s strength going forward.