Microsoft crushes Intel’s mobile hopes

Wintel is dead or at least off the desktop. It became clear last week that Windows 8 on tablets will be essentially an ARM-only affair, putting the biggest potential tablet market squarely in the hands of ARM processor chips. The largest actual market for tablets — Apple’s iPad — is already based on ARM chips, as is the first runner-up, those using Google’s Android. Oh, the Research in Motion BlackBerry PlayBooks use ARM chips as well, not that many people have bought those. Ditto for Hewlett-Packard’s short-lived TouchPads.

But Microsoft’s move threatens to seal Intel’s coffin. Although CEO Seteve Ballmer said Microsoft’s Windows strategy was “Intel and ARM, not Intel or ARM,” that’s a misleading statement. Microsoft has since clarified the real strategy: ARM is for tablets that run Windows 8’s new style of Metro apps, and Intel is for PCs that run both pieces of Windows 8: its modern Metro half and its legacy Windows 7 half. That means mobile is ARM territory across the board.

Yes, theoretically, tablet makers could use Intel’s Atom chips, which powered the briefly exciting netbook market a few years back. But you see hardly any Atom-based tablets these days, just a few of the old-style Windows XP/Vista/7 tablets adopted in small part by government agencies but no one else. That’s true even though Intel a year ago ported the smartphone version of Android to run on such tablets. (There is no Intel version of the tablet version of Android.)

Wait, you say: Google last week announced that Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (the unified tablet-and-smartphone version due by Christmas) and all future versions of Android would be optimized for both ARM and Intel chips. That should mean Intel-based Android tablets are on the horizon.

But let’s remember why Microsoft said its strategy assumed ARM tablets and Intel PCs: Intel chips consume way too much power, resulting in unacceptably low battery life in tablets and smartphones. If Intel had a real answer to that issue, you know Microsoft would’ve been all over it. It could have planned for Intel-based tablets that ran the whole Windows 8, not just the Metro part. When you consider that Windows 8 is not likely to be released for a year or so, you can see Microsoft had no confidence that Intel’s chips would be mobile-savvy in the near future.

Microsoft isn’t alone in reaching this conclusion. Apple threatened Intel last spring to stop using Intel chips in its MacBook laptops — the company’s biggest seller — because of their power wastage. Intel publicly acknowledged Apple’s threat and said it would do better. Apple’s threat carries real weight: Apple has transitioned its OS twice acrosss chip architectures, in a way that apps did not need to be recompiled to run. First, it moved from the Motorola 68000’s complex-instruction-set computing (CISC) architecture to the IBM PowerPC’s partially reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC) architectire, and then from PowerPC to Intel’s x86 CISC architecture. Plus, Apple has already ported the core parts of Mac OS X shared with the iPad’s and iPhone’s iOS to the RISC architecture used in its ARM-based A4 and A5 chips.

Microsoft couldn’t make the same threat on behalf of the PC industry, as it doesn’t seem to know how to port Windows 7’s core to RISC chips — if it did, I believe it would have done so as part of Windows 8’s ARM support. Though to be fair, in the late 1990s, Microsoft had ported the original Windows NT (the basis of today’s Windows 7) to the PowerPC chip, though apps had to be recompiled to work on the PowerPC version, so perhaps it could do it again if it really wanted to.

As for Google’s endorsement of Intel, I see that as a hollow commitment. Google’s hardware partners already make ARM-based tablets, and Google’s so-called pledge to Intel doesn’t force them to change. Why would they? ARM chips are cheaper, and customers want iPad-like battery life of 10 to 11 hours. Google was just looking for a way to stand out, and Intel was searching for someone to give it some love. It’s a marriage made in marketing, not engineering.

Maybe Intel will deliver on that promise and keep Apple’s business, which will also benefit PC laptop makers, who will gain the same power efficiencies that Apple is forcing Intel to make. The very fact it was so behind the curve that it took a threat from Apple to acknowledge the problem shows the real issue at Intel: Nobody seems to be aiming for the future.

Intel appears to be following the same path as RIM: For years, it was the only chip game in town, save for AMD, whose chips were essentially clones, not a different technology. So whatever Intel built, PC makers dealt with. Intel happily went along the same trajectory, not looking down the road.

To be sure, the move to multicore ended that awful period in the mid-2000s when PCs got so hot they melted their cases and reduced power usage as a result. But there was no fundamental threat to spur Intel to think different. Instead, it dabbled in trying to break into the communications chip business by trying to jump-start the WiMax market (that hasn’t worked) and more recently in trying to diversify into software by buying a group of unrelated software vendors. Its big mobile bet in software is in McAfee, which is hoping that Apple, Google, and others will make mobile OSes as susceptible to attacks as PC OSes turned out to be — a strategy that banks on more of the same from history. It appears its chip strategy is no different.

But so far, with Google as the main exception, the mobile technologies are following a different path than historic ones. They are not flat PCs, and their OSes (except for Android) are better designed to avoid needing malware software like McAfee’s — or energy-burning, complex chips like Intel’s.

This article, “Microsoft crushes Intel’s mobile hopes,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.