Microsoft Intel completely solo

It has been suggested that the United States International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) be moved to China for hosting because the popularity there is getting weaker. However, CES 2011 is expected to become a watershed for the development of the global consumer electronics industry. On the day of the unveiling, under the turbulent wave of flat panels, great industrial changes were hidden.

For example, in the past many years, who can pull the gluey Microsoft and Intel? No. AMD tried for many years and only got a chance of less than 20%. The Wintel alliance formed by the two giants monopolized the global PC industry for more than 20 years.

However, yesterday's US Casino, Microsoft's own dominated scene, but let this alliance become the wind floating.

Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer announced that the next-generation operating system Windows will run on "everything", including Intel's processor architecture rival ARM. He also asked several Microsoft engineers to repeatedly demonstrate how the operating system runs smoothly on the ARM processor platform.

"Now, the only limitation of the Windows platform is imagination." Ballmer said that in the future all devices will have Windows.

In fact, the "First Financial Daily" reported in July last year that ARM and Microsoft signed a new strategic cooperation, which authorized the core processor architecture to Microsoft. This is the first time that ARM has licensed the processor architecture to a software company. Even if it is a hardware company, it only authorizes four companies such as Qualcomm in the world. At that time, the two sides kept secret about this newspaper. People in ARM China also said that the specific content of the agreement was limited to the "3 individuals" of ARM Global.

Microsoft was a bit nervous at the time. Because, this is the giant for the first time in the form of strategic cooperation to break the Wintel system, the previous 10 years, although it has been working with ARM, but only to accommodate the mobile phone market, it does not affect Intel's business. And today, this license gives Microsoft the opportunity to directly expand the market for smartphones and notebooks, especially tablets, that are not Intel processors. Ballmer's position is exactly the result of Microsoft's expansion over the past five months. It has been completely solo.

However, Microsoft still has a lot to do. Steven Sinofsky, director of Windows, said yesterday that the current mobile phone system has fully supported ARM technology, but the official launch of PC-grade operating systems supporting ARM processors may be in the second half of this year.

In fact, it is also from the beginning of last year, Intel accelerated away from Microsoft, it is not only based on Linux to develop open source operating systems, and established a meego alliance with Nokia, specifically positioned to expand the open source platform, which directly robbed Microsoft's business.

Moreover, Intel also announced recently that it will formally launch the smart phone platform this year, which will be its most eye-catching move following the launch of the Mobile Internet Atom platform.

The driving force of giant solo is naturally business interests. Although the traditional PC market is still growing, it is already exhausted. With the popularity of 3G and the acceleration of convergence of the three networks, the mobile Internet trend triggered by the Apple iPad has almost made CES a single theme for tablet computers. Almost all PC industry and mobile phone giants have launched flat-panel products.

Among them, Lenovo's actions proved how it fits in with the disintegration of the Wintel Alliance. Following the abandonment of the Intel processor in the smartbook, it used the mobile phone giant Qualcomm in its tablet PCs, and the Qualcomm processor used the ARM architecture. Two years ago, Lenovo only used AMD's processors in desktops and servers.