Until September 13, 2011, the law of business cooperation Intel and Microsoft jointly promote the development of the IT industry as a whole-software upgrades to promote the hardware generation, that is, the famous "Andy to what, Bill take what" (What Andy Gives, Bill Takes It Away, Andy refers to former Intel CEO Andy gruff, bill refers to former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates),
But when Intel's fifth CEO, Paul O'dempsey, smiled and reached out to Google's Android director, Andy Rubin, and Microsoft'S CEO, Steve Ballmer, on the same day, armed with a tablet that wasn't an Intel chip, showing the latest Windows8 to the public, were they excited to finally break the“Andy-bill's law”, or were they frustrated?
No one knows. The only certainty is that the future of the IT history of the writers will be the book of the day: as if overnight, it let the entire IT industry into unprecedented chaos, but also unprecedented change.
Away Wintel
In fact, since 1980, in charge of IBM PC don Estrich, in the launch of IBM's first compatible PC when Intel and Microsoft brought together to start, until now, Intel and Microsoft have never publicly admitted that there is an indestructible” Wintel alliance."This, of course, takes into account antitrust reasons. Over the years, though AMD once outperformed Intel in terms of price and performance, it never really shook up the latter's de facto“gold partnership” with Microsoft.
But this time it's really different. Apple's 3G iPhone, launched in 2008, and the iPad since then, have ushered in an era of unprecedented mobile connectivity, and in just a few years, the company, which has been completely defeated by Microsoft, has surpassed Microsoft and Intel in market capitalization, reaching $ 381.6 billion—the equivalent of the world's 30th largest economy. And since 2008, Microsoft and Intel's share price have not reached the price of the year.
Not only that. According to IDC statistics, in the past year, the smartphone operating system, Google Android has accounted for 38.9% of the market share, Apple accounted for 18.2%, Nokia accounted for 20.6%, Microsoft only 3.8%, compared with the peak of the year more than half of the market share.
Intel's progress in the mobile market is more can be used to describe the trivial. Although Intel last year set up a new division of netbooks and tablets, and for $ 1.4 billion acquired mobile phone chipmaker Infineon's wireless business, but far Water is difficult to quench the thirst. Because of the absolute disadvantage of the energy ratio, the last of all smartphones and tablets sold in 2010, more than 95% are licensed by ARM CPU architecture, with Intel and AMD x86 architecture for mobile devices, almost zero.
Such a situation is almost impossible to change in the short term. Although Intel's new processor power for tablets was only 5W at the beginning of the year, it was 4-5 times the ARM-based processor, and the price of the latter was only 1/4 of the former. Intel's truly commercially available 22-nanometer chip will not be available until next year.
Although Microsoft's biggest advantage over the past few decades is based on Wintel platform developed tens of millions of software applications, most of them, can not run directly on the ARM platform without a transplant, but Microsoft can not wait. It took Microsoft less than a year to get an ARM license, and earlier this year it unveiled a tablet running Windows-based on ARM architecture. On the day of September 13, Microsoft even sent out a free 5000 pre-installed Windows8 Samsung tablet, they use the CPU, all based on ARM architecture.
On the same day, Intel announced an alliance with Google to launch the x86-based Medfield mobile chip platform, and threw $ 300 million in marketing costs to promote a“ultrabook”laptop platform based on the latest chip design technology and energy-saving technology, which can "run 24 hours, 10 days networking standby", in order to "re-invent the notebook", the future can
However, public opinion is not as optimistic as Intel. Some analysts pointed out that the manufacturing process of Intel mobile phone platform is still based on the existing 32-nanometer process, heat compared to the current Intel can do, I am afraid there will not be much change. In addition, although some analysts believe that "ultrabook" next year will occupy more than 40% of the market share of laptops, the media still questioned, Intel in three steps until 2013 can officially ship the invention, two years after it can cope with the fierce competition in the market?
Wintel's back
On September 13, Intel CEO Edwin O'demillion (right) shook hands with Andy Rubin, vice president of Google Mobile Product Engineering, in a keynote speech at the 2011 Intel Development Forum. After Microsoft held hands with ARM, Intel began to“cling " to Google.