Wintel's back

Do you know "Andy-Beer Law"?

Until September 13, 2011, this piece of Intel and Microsoft jointly promoted the law of business cooperation in the development of the entire IT industry. The software upgrade promoted hardware replacement, namely the famous "What Andy Gives, Bill Takes What" (What Andy Gives, Bill Takes It Away, Andy refers to Intel's former CEO Andy Grove, Bill refers to Microsoft's former CEO Bill Gates, also known as the "Wintel Alliance", has been unbreakable for more than 30 years.

But when Intel’s fifth CEO, Paul Otellini, smiled and extended his hand to Google’s Android director Andy Rubin on the day, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer held a tablet that was not an Intel chip on the same day. Computers, when presenting the latest Windows 8 to the public, are they excited to finally break "Andy-Beer's Law" or are they frustrated?

Nobody knows. The only certainty is that the writers of the future IT history will surely write a special book this day: as if overnight, it has caused the entire IT industry to fall into an unprecedented chaos, and it has also shown unprecedented changes.

Going away from Wintel

In fact, Don Estelich, who was in charge of IBM PCs in 1980, started by bringing together Intel and Microsoft when IBM introduced the first PC compatible. Until now, Intel and Microsoft have never publicly admitted that There is an indestructible "Wintel Alliance." This is of course the reason for considering anti-monopoly. Over the years, although AMD once surpassed Intel in terms of price and performance, it has never really shaken the latter's de facto "gold medal cooperation" relationship with Microsoft.

But this time it is really different. Apple’s 3G version of the iPhone, launched in 2008, and the iPad launched since then have created an unprecedented mobile internet era. In just a few years, this company, which has been completely defeated by Microsoft, has surpassed the combined value of Microsoft and Intel. It reached 381.6 billion U.S. dollars - equivalent to the 30th largest economy in the world. Since 2008, the stock prices of Microsoft and Intel have never reached the price of the year.

Not only that. According to IDC's statistics, in the past year's smartphone operating system, Google’s Android has occupied 38.9% of the market share, Apple occupies 18.2%, Nokia occupies 20.6%, Microsoft only 3.8%, more than half of the time The market share is in stark contrast.

And Intel's progress in the mobile market can be described as insignificant. Although Intel set up a new business unit for netbooks and tablet PCs last year, and acquired the wireless business of Infineon, a handset chip maker, for US$1.4 billion, it is difficult to understand the thirst. Due to the absolute disadvantage of energy consumption ratio, over 95% of all smartphones and tablet PCs sold in the past in 2010 have adopted ARM-authorized CPU architecture, and the X86-based mobile devices represented by Intel and AMD are almost zero.

This situation has almost no possibility of change in the short term. Although Intel’s new processor for tablet PCs released at the beginning of the year consumes only 5W, this is still 4-5 times that of ARM-based processors, and the price of the latter is only 1/4 of the former. Intel's truly commercially available 22nm chip will not be available until next year.

Although Microsoft's biggest advantage is the tens of millions of applications developed on the Wintel platform for decades, most of them cannot be directly run on the ARM platform without transplantation, but Microsoft can't wait any longer. . After being licensed by ARM last year, Microsoft took only less than a year to demonstrate its Windows-based tablet based on the ARM architecture earlier this year. On September 13, Microsoft even sent out 5,000 Samsung Tablet PCs with Windows 8 preinstalled. The CPU they use is based on the ARM architecture.

Almost completely a stress response, Intel chose tit for tat, announced on the same day that it had an alliance with Google, launched the Medfield mobile phone chip platform based on the x86 architecture, and raised $300 million in promotion costs, promoting a technology based on the latest chip design and Energy-saving technology "Ultrabook" laptop platform, "24 hours of operation, 10 days of networking standby," with a view to "re-inventing the notebook", the future can still be channeled into the mobile market.

However, public opinion is not as optimistic as Intel. Some analysts pointed out that the manufacturing process of Intel's mobile phone platform is still based on the existing 32nm process, and the heat output is probably not much improved compared to what Intel can do now. In addition, although some analysts believe that “ultrabook” will account for more than 40% of the notebook computer market share next year, the media still questioned that Intel’s invention can only be formally shipped in three steps until 2013, two years later. Is it still able to cope with the fierce competition in the market?

"AA" troubles Microsoft's situation is not as optimistic as it seems. Although Ballmer claimed at the press conference that the Windows 8 development version had more than 500,000 downloads overnight, it was noted that this development version does not support the ARM architecture. What is even more skeptical is that Ballmer mentioned in his speech: "While most of the work on the Windows 8 operating system is ready, there are still many things the company has to do. The company is trying to make the new operating system support ARM. ."

Things really got worse. Just a week later, multiple IT sites broke news, saying that Microsoft’s senior vice president for Windows 8 at the press conference, Steve Shinowski, confirmed at the Windows Financial Analyst Conference that it’s running on ARM devices. Windows 8 is not directly compatible with thousands of existing x86-based applications as previously thought.

In fact, as early as May of this year, Renee James had implied this in an investor conference. The senior Intel vice president explained why Intel broke the “Wintel Alliance” and said that Microsoft and ARM are not Not as sweet as the outside world thought, "Older applications are currently unable to support Windows 8 and run on our competitors' (ARM) platforms, and will not be available in the future."

This is not good news for ARM. No one wants to copy "Wintel" mode more than ARM, and have a share in it. Back in the 1980s, ARM's predecessor, Acorn Computer, had applied to Intel for an 80286 processor license, but was ruthlessly rejected. Another Loser, Apple, was also refused compatibility.

Similar to Apple's situation, for ARM, which was excluded from Wintel, most of the time in the past 30 years, almost all spent time in reorganization and embarrassment. There is nothing to be done with the strategy. On the one hand, it has to face the recession of small-scale chip design market alone. Even the Tablet PC Newton project that was the earliest cooperation with Apple was eventually dismissed by Steve Jobs.

In desperation, ARM had to insist on low-energy and low-cost differential competition. In addition, unlike Intel's monolithic design and manufacturing of chips, ARM took a meager IP licensing model in the chip market, which made it in the past. In the past few decades, the market value has not exceeded a fraction of Intel's - ARM's global employees only 1900, annual revenues of 600 million US dollars; Intel has 82,000 employees worldwide, revenue remained at more than 35 billion US dollars.

The opportunity came. Intel x86 architecture's high power consumption defects and high R&D investment can not meet the low energy consumption and diversified demands of mobile internet devices. Technology has overcome compatibility. The financial report shows that ARM's revenue for the second quarter reached US$190.2 million, an increase of 27% over the same period of the previous year. By the end of the second quarter, the company had signed 29 processor licensing agreements, including Apple, Qualcomm, and Mobile Internet giants such as Freescale and Google sold 200 million chips in China last year. Each handset contains 2.7 ARM processors, which means that more than 70 million ARM mobile phones have been sold. 2 times the PC shipment.

But one of the shortcomings of ARM is that it cannot be compatible with the accumulation of application software cultivated by Wintel mode over the past 30 years and the usage habits of billions of consumers. It also makes it difficult to enter the same huge scale even in the mobile market. The PC market, especially the commercial PC market, is a half-step. Although Qualcomm has successfully run a new Flash plug-in on the desktop version of IE10 on ARM-based tablets, the industry knows that Flash is just the easiest solution to many Windows applications.

So far, ARM and Android's "AA combination", despite the rousing of the market, but the level of tacit understanding of the alliance, far less than Wintel. ARM's multi-benefit authorization strategy has made the platform on the market too diverse, resulting in the development of the Android system lagging far behind the development of hardware, and also brought about a considerable degree of confusion in the market, so that in the face of iOS challenges have to shrink the line of defense. In Other words, this is far from reaching the "Andy-Beer's Law" definition.

In addition, yes, habits, Google Android and Apple iOS's biggest awkwardness, is actually Wintel left to Microsoft and Intel's greatest heritage and opportunities. Although IDC anticipates that Android will occupy 43.8% of the mobile market in 2015, iOS will decline from its current share, while Microsoft's Windows Phone is expected to recapture a significant share of the market, and IDC is expected to reach 20.3%.

Intel's situation is similar. Just as the United States "Ballon Weekly" in the proposed purchase of Intel's stock analysis, although Intel is still unable to challenge ARM in the mobile market in the short term, but the company "will remain firmly in control of the desktop market."

Who is Andy, who is busy with Bill Wintel and AA, the most confused and distressed, than the downstream hardware manufacturers.

Over the past few decades, according to Anti-Moore Law, Andy and Bill have taken away the bulk of their profits, and every 18 months, hardware companies must sell twice as many products in order to maintain their existing profit margins. . This made every hardware vendor miserable in the Wintel era, and it was also the fundamental reason why PC makers had to abandon the transition.

In the post Wintel era, who is Andy and Bill are not important, it is important that such an elusive oligarch development model will continue? In June of this year, ASUS Chairman Shi Chongyi once asserted that the Wintel era is over and that there is no processor or system vendor that could dominate the PC, tablet, and mobile markets as before Wintel. The boundaries of these three markets have been blurred.

Asustek is not the only company that wants to break this cycle. On September 10, NVIDIA announced its withdrawal from the chipset business because of a dispute with Intel's authorization. Its CEO Huang Renxun said in an investor conference that the company will reorganize around mobile processors and graphics cards. Xiao Jun, the founder of Xiaomi Technology, has said some time ago that the mobile phone industry is not monopolized by the Wintel Alliance and is an open market.

But for the vast majority of downstream manufacturers, a market dominated by Andy-Bill is still much better than a chaotic market. Big companies are waiting for the price and ambiguous: Dell leans on Microsoft, Acer binds Wintel, Lenovo uses Qualcomm Android portfolio, but more small and medium-sized companies are on the edge of the dangerous cliff - in the Android tablet market, there has been a serious homogenization The more prone to competition is that software developers must repeatedly develop the same software for more and more platforms.

This may be just a matter of desperation, and the “Andy-Bill” structure in the post Wintel era is also likely to settle quickly. Just as NetScape founder Mark Anderson stated in his article "Why Software Is Occupying the World," although today's stock market still hates technology, as more and more large companies and industries start to rely on software to run from bookstores. , recording industry, film industry, games industry, telecommunications industry, retail industry, to the petroleum industry, financial industry, health education industry and even national defense are increasingly based on software. In other words, it is not important who is Andy and Bill. It is important that software companies will eventually overcome hardware and take over our world.