The hiring of Anand Chandrasekher "shows that Qualcomm is finally serious about bringing its marketing strategy out into the open," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. "They've always been quiet. Nobody much knew them."

Though it's much bigger that Qualcomm, Gold said that Intel's main competition today comes from the manufacturers of ARM-based chips, including Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung and others. The ARM chips are used in smartphones and tablets.

Chandrasekher left Intel in March after 25 years.

In his last post there, Chandrasekher was responsible for Intel's Atom chip, designed to be an energy efficient processor for smartphones. He had earlier headed Intel's successful development of Centrino mobile chips that are used in laptops.

Atom has failed to make important inroads against ARM-based chips while Qualcomm is one of the biggest suppliers of ARM-based processors for smartphones.