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Nevertheless, Gartner analysts estimate that one billion personal computers will be sold in the next six years. At the same time, the market researchers acknowledge that their projected 9 percent annual growth rate will in the future be largely based on continued expansion of sales in the developing world.

The forecast for the United States remains cloudy, and signs of consolidation in the PC industry are everywhere. Earlier this year, for example, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer, the top makers of personal computers behind No. 1 Dell Computer, merged largely in response to the slowing growth of the industry.

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So far the response of the personal computer industry to its worst decline in history has largely been one of denial.

"People are walking around like members of the cargo cult after World War II," said Mark Resch, a partner at Onomy Labs, a Palo Alto, Calif., technology consulting firm. "They're just hoping the planes come back."

But some in the computing industry believe that the planes will never come back, at least in desktop computing.

"The world is being turned upside down and that is not a happy thing for most PC companies," said David R. Ditzel, the founder and chief technology officer of Transmeta, a maker of microprocessors for portable computers. "Things are going to be tough for the traditional PC guys because they won't go back to their 20 percent growth rates."

Even personal computer industry veterans acknowledge the paucity of new ideas that currently troubles the computer industry.

"As long as new PC's are just faster, cheaper, better than old PC's you're going to get slow growth," said Robert Frankston, a co-inventor of the computer spreadsheet application.

Intel, as might be expected, sees the world in a different light. Although Mr. Otellini acknowledges that many applications do not benefit from greater speed — a 1.5 gigahertz Pentium 4 chip will play a DVD movie with no less fidelity than a 2.5 gigahertz chip — he points to the gains in applications like video editing, which will continue to improve significantly with each new generation of faster chips.

He also says there are new categories of software that will continue to drive growth in the existing personal computer market: technologies like voice recognition, more sophisticated search tools, wireless networking and computer security.

But Mr. Otellini acknowledged that most of the incremental growth in the personal computer market since 2000 is already coming from what he calls "emerging markets" — developing countries where there are now few computers.

"We believe that 50 percent of all the incremental units sold in the next five years will come from these markets," he said. There are now about 500 million personal computers in the world, he said, and with the help of the emerging markets the industry, over a long period, could still expect to see double-digit growth outside the industrial world.

Nevertheless, Intel and companies that depend on it, like Microsoft, have begun adjusting their strategies for a post-PC world.

Several years ago Microsoft changed the company mission statement to drop the term personal computer, instead asserting that the company's mission was: "Empowering people through great software — any time, any place and on any device."

At the same time, Microsoft has begun to introduce a variety of consumer electronics products that could lessen the demand for PC's — including the Xbox game machine, a combination personal digital assistant and cellphone, and a TV-oriented Windows Media Server.

For their part Microsoft executives insist that the new consumer computing devices will not speed the demise of the PC.

"We don't agree with the statement the PC is dead," said Greg Sullivan, the lead product manager of the Windows XP operating system.

Still, hints of such a shift abound. In the midst of a general computing and chip-making downturn, ARM Holdings, a British company that is the world's largest designer of microprocessors for consumer devices like cellphones and personal digital assistants, is experiencing record growth.

ARM chips are designed for the new world of computing away from the desktop PC. This year, there are 1.3 billion ARM microprocessors in cellphones, personal digital assistants and other consumer devices — for the first time exceeding the one billion personal computers that have been produced.

"There is tremendous growth in all the little things that help life," said John Rayfield, an ARM vice president based in Los Gatos, Calif. "Centralizing them all in one large computer makes no sense."