The end of Wintel

http://economist.com/node/16693547

by ab9 • 16 years ago

53 28 16 years ago

economist.com

Raphael• 16 years ago

AMD designed the 64-bit architecture.

Cabal• 16 years ago

AMD designed a 64-bit architecture. There were many 64-bit architectures around long before x86-64 in 2000.

melling• 16 years ago

It is probably worth noting that AMD brought 64-bit to the PC world. Intel was telling customers they didn't need it.

AMD actually took a small bite out of Intel and Intel quickly changed its mind.

Breaking the Wintel monopoly will spur a lot of innovation. A third choice like Chrome or Android on tablets or notebooks might do the trick.

lolipop1• 16 years ago

The author seems to generalize the "market" here. The effects described on the markets are/willbe much more subtle than the article claims. IT has always been multi-faceted. It's not like MS, Intel, Oracle, IBM or Cisco could have stopped doing marketing and still be where they are.

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

There's a good joke about that, it goes like this:

A man is seated next to Bill Gates in the business class of an airplane. Mr. Gates, he asks, how come that with your name and brand recognition and your tremendous turnover as well as the locked-in nature of your customers that you still spend money on advertising.

Gates replies: Do you like the speed at which this aircraft is travelling ? How about we turn the engines off ?

InclinedPlane5• 16 years ago

I'm not overly convinced. A big reason why most major corporations advertise so heavily is just because it's something that big companies do, it can be tough to buck a trend especially when billions are on the line.

But aside from that, advertising is a business expense that is fully tax deductible. For many big businesses the net cost of advertising is zero.

Tamerlin3• 16 years ago

That's true, but the author is looking at what's under the hood -- at the moment, ALL of those companies are heavily depending on Microsoft and/or Intel. In most cases, both.

Example -- IBM is still one of Intel's biggest server OEM's. And most of IBM's corporate environment runs in Windows. (For that matter, the same could be said for most of the bloated US Federal government.)

The author is also ignoring the fact that the Wintel duopoly has been making inroads in corporate markets, as well -- for years now Intel has pretty much owned the low and mid-range server markets, and is making inroads on higher end markets (in fact, the only thing that so far has been able to hurt Itanium meaingfully is... Xeon), and due largely to SQL Server, Microsoft has been making large inroads into those markets also.

Apple's growth in the PC market isn't harming Intel one bit -- quite the opposite in fact, because Apple's success is tied to Intel.

I don't think Intel's dominance is in any danger. Microsoft's is another story -- Intel will be able to gain a lot of mobile market share, because Intel has the best semiconductor manufacturing in the business.

That said, I think that ARM will be a tougher competitor than AMD, because ARM is already much, much bigger, and some the foundries making ARM processors for their partners are larger than Intel, even if they aren't quite as high-tech.

The declining margins in processors are probably why Intel's been going after the graphics market, the cluster-on-a-chip market (Larrabee), and doing the whole-system thing for the mobile market, rather than just the Atom chip by itself.

known2• 16 years ago

Does Intel make chips for Cell phones?

azim• 16 years ago

There are rumors circulating that Intel is currently in talks to acquire Infineon's wireless business. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Intel-Infineon-...

known2• 16 years ago

Very informative. Thank you.

nimrody• 16 years ago

Infineon does not produce application processors for the mobile market -- except perhaps based on ARM technology. They do make baseband and RF chips that are used in cell phones.

Intel definitely wants to get into the mobile / cellular business and have made a similar attempt before (search for DSP/C -- now owned by Marvell).

In fact, Intel was even making ARM based application processors in the past (called Xscale and derived from DEC's StrongArm design). Eventually they sold the entire division.

They would love to have a version of Atom powering mobile phones. Right now ARM is the de-facto standard.

The end of Wintel

Related Stories