Microsoft and Intel’s Decades-Long Alliance Has Started To Fray

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Microsoft and Intel’s Decades-Long Alliance Has Started To Fray

THEY CALLED IT Wintel.

For decades, two companies worked side by side to build the very foundation of personal computing. Microsoft built the operating system—Windows—and Intel built the chips. But Wintel is no more. Sure, Windows will continue to run on Intel chips. But Wintel as a mighty alliance has died. It’s been fading for years, and this week Microsoft snuffed out the last of it.

On Wednesday, from a conference stage in Silicon Valley, Microsoft told the world it plans on using ARM chips in the servers that underpin Windows Azure, the sweeping collection of cloud computing services that represents the company’s future. It was the most tactical of announcements, a carefully considered collection of words meant to shift computing’s balance of power. Microsoft has yet to actually put ARM chips in the data centers that run Azure. It merely pledged that it would.

“All this is before we’ve actually seen a chip,” says Patrick Moorhead, the president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, a firm that closely follows the chip business. In other words, this announcement isn’t about technology—at least not yet. It’s little more than a push against Intel’s market power. Like Google and Amazon and others, it seems, Microsoft wants an added bargaining chip when buying computer chips from the biggest computer chip maker on Earth. The question: will it get what it wants?

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/wintel-going-not-dead-yet/