SANTA CLARA, Calif.  Intel has worked hard and spent a lot of money over the years to shape its image: It is the company that celebrates its quest to make computer chips ever smaller, faster and cheaper with a quick five-note jingle at the end of its commercials.

But as Intel tries to expand beyond the personal computer chip business, it is changing in subtle ways. For the first time, its long unheralded software developers, more than 3,000 of them, have stolen some of the spotlight from its hardware engineers. These programmers find themselves at the center of Intel’s forays into areas like mobile phones and video games.

The most attention-grabbing element of Intel’s software push is a version of the open-source Linux operating system called Moblin. It represents a direct assault on the Windows franchise of Microsoft, Intel’s longtime partner.

“This is a very determined, risky effort on Intel’s part,” said Mark Shuttleworth, the chief executive of Canonical, which makes another version of Linux called Ubuntu.