Sean Maloney: The British-born Maloney has been one of the rising stars at Intel for years.
Among other jobs, he served as Andy Grove's assistant during the Pentium bug crisis and ran Asia-Pacific sales for the company during the late '90s. He now heads up the communications division.
With Paul Otellini slated to become the next CEO, Maloney won't have a shot at the top spot at Intel for about five years, when age will require Otellini to step down.
On the other hand, Maloney is the likely successor to Otellini.
Vyomesh Joshi. Joshi runs HP's printer and PC divisions and is generally held in high regard by employees and analysts. Selecting an in-house candidate would also allow HP to demonstrate consistency.
Along these lines, another possible candidate is Ann Livermore, executive vice-president of the technology solutions group at HP.
Ed Zander: The Motorola CEO (and former president of Sun) gets high marks from analysts and headhunters.
However, he's riding a crest of success. Motorola's sales have begun to perk up, thanks in part to fancy new phones. The company has also launched a home networking strategy.
Kevin Rollins: Headhunters salivate whenever the Dell CEO's name comes up. "If I were HP's board, I would do whatever I could to pull Kevin Rollins out of Dell," Nosal said. It's a tough order, though.
"I don't know that there is a recipe that can turn it around," Rollins said in November. "I wouldn't go there first off. I wouldn't go run that one."
But who knows how long HP's list really is? Mader noted that HP's directors may be interested in relatively unknown candidates from the telecommunications services arena.
"I think you're going to see a selection of someone out of left field. It will be somewhat like when Lou Gerstner was hired by IBM," Mader said. "It would be about leadership and operational excellence, more than industry knowledge."
Conglomerate CEOs are another possibility. HP is the sum of several different divisions, so the board may try to get someone who is running or has run a company like General Electric or Tyco International -- one that's a collection of somewhat independent units.
"I think they'd like to find another Jack Welch [former GE chief executive], someone who has run a conglomerate," said Carl Claunch, research vice-president at Gartner. In this vein, Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy has been touted as a potentially attractive candidate by some headhunters.
CNET News.com's Ina Fried contributed to this report.
