It would change a lot if it were true. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft plans to build the expertise necessary to abandon Intel, though. And though they're making inroads into building their own hardware, I don't think they're in any position to abandon their OEMs yet, either.
Why would they? Right now they have the best laptop and tablet chip, bar none, and total vertical integration. They've invested heavily in M1 and M2 and M3 is due out next year. What would an Intel chip offer, except uncertainty?
On the compatibility side, Boot Camp is less useful when Windows on Arm does its own x86 emulation and works well enough in Parallels. On the graphics side they wrote their own DirectX 12 wrapper. If they can port some AI libs over, running them on 64 GB of shared CPU/GPU memory would be pretty amazing.
Maybe in 10 years, if Intel generationally leapfrogs them again like with the PowerPC era. But short of that, what would they have to gain?
I completely agree with that. Actually building pro-quality chips that compete with top end Intel chips is really hard and is likely more of a bottleneck than 3rd party software.
I really still have a lot of doubts about this idea that they will even try it. It doesn't seem that there is really anything in it for them in doing this.
"Intel says its customers are reducing their inventory, which, in English, means they’re buying fewer chips because they haven’t used up the ones they had already bought in the prior quarters. That’s because they’re not selling as many PCs or servers. Indeed, consumers who are in the market for a new PC will be holding back on their purchases until Windows 8 is released, but that market is already sputtering anyway, in no small part because Apple’s iPad continues to batter notebooks sales."
Up to now in mobile, Intel has been utterly crushed by ARM licensees. Microsoft's bet-the-company approach to Windows 8 unification with mobile and ARM has not been helpful to Intel.
How long will it take for Intel to field design-winning chips for mobile? Will it be 2012 starting with Microsoft Surface & Motorola, or much later if at all?
I don't know if this is the common perception and I'm definitely a bit biased, but it seems like a bad sign for Intel. Without a paradigm shift I don't foresee anything improving for them. Their sales team must be insane though. I feel a bit "good riddance" about it too and wish ARM or RISC would become the standard for gaming and productivity (read: rendering, compiling, not Microsoft Word) PCs.
I really gotta wonder if this was a long term plan or in response to Intel leaving MS in the lurch with the changes to x86 strategy on mobile or a bit of both.
tldr if you want to know why this article is different than the others that have been on HN: Intel is making this chip Windows-only because they expect Windows8 non-RT on tablets with this chip to fail. And they want it to fail because the chip is too big to sell cheaply.
This is an Intel plan, not Microsoft. They're trying to get press for x86 designs in mobile more than anything. Clearly Intel and Microsoft's interests are diverging here, or CES wouldn't have had the Win8 on ARM bomb dropped.
People no longer care that there is "Intel Inside" when it comes to cell phones and tablets, the fastest growing markets. Sure, the Intel/AMD chip will support all of the x86 baggage, but what phone or tablet has legacy code to support?
Seems to be the case. There are laptops manufactured 2-3 years ago using 7th gen Intel, which isn't making the cut. Maybe MS will back off after all the corporate IT people start bitching about their laptops.
Microsoft has created a non-intel living room device, the X-Box.
Dropping support for the OEM's in the Phone and PC space would be an interesting move, which I think they could carry off quite quickly. I don't think they are headed in that direction myself.
I think it signals diversification for Intel; not necessarily a shift away from Windows. Running Windows on ultra-low-end boards like this makes no sense; the license would cost more than the board itself and the board isn't powerful enough to run anything approximating a modern version of Windows. It's an order of magnitude slower than your cell phone.
Ultimately though, the x86 PC (aka Windows) market is not a significant growth market for Intel. They'll keep pumping money into it as long as they get their 3-5% growth, but if Intel wants to move the needle for the company, they need to find new markets.
Intel has responded to this realisation by .. giving up on mobile, for the time being.
(The integrated graphics are getting quite acceptable and we're starting to see PC-on-a-stick and cheap Intel tablets as a result, but I'm not sure how big a market that is)
It's expected that they're trying to build chips that are faster on x86 rather than switch to an entirely new architecture - they can't switch without the full support of Microsoft and at least some major Linux distributions, not to mention the OEMs they sell their chips to.
This is only a temporary thing though. Linux will be made to work on M1 hardware (getting pretty close already) and Intel is already heading in the same direction.
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