Will Microsoft's "affair" with Qualcomm and Intel affect its status as the "first wife"?

There are no eternal friends or eternal enemies, only eternal interests.

On November 6, 2017, Intel and AMD, two old rivals in the semiconductor industry, announced their realignment; a month later, Intel's old love, Microsoft, entered a honeymoon period with Qualcomm. At the Qualcomm Technology Summit on December 5, several Windows 10 notebooks based on the Snapdragon 835 processor were officially unveiled.

Perhaps what is even more heartbreaking for Intel is that Microsoft Executive Vice President Terry Myerson personally came to Hawaii to support Qualcomm.

The relationship between Qualcomm and Microsoft

Qualcomm was founded in 1985, ten years later than Microsoft. However, for a long time after Qualcomm was founded, it and Microsoft could be said to be two unrelated companies. One's main business is computer operating systems and software, and it gradually grew into a world-class giant in the last decade of the 20th century; while the other started with digital communications and wireless communications technology, dominated the CDMA field, and gave up the mobile phone business and system business in 1999 and began to focus on the research and development of chip technology.

Of course, from the very beginning, Qualcomm adopted the ARM chip architecture.

Qualcomm and Microsoft first started working together in May 2000. At that time, Microsoft was actively entering the mobile field and it valued Qualcomm's CDMA digital wireless technology. The cooperation between the two parties was to develop hardware reference designs for a variety of mobile devices, such as smart phones based on Microsoft Mobile Explorer and wireless Pocket PCs using Qualcomm's iMSM4100 chip and system software.

However, the more dramatic cooperation between the two parties was six years later. On May 11, 2006, Qualcomm and Microsoft announced that they would work together to port the Windows Mobile operating system to Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem (MSM) chipset. In addition to providing the operating system, Microsoft also provided Microsoft Office Mobile and Windows Media Player Mobile as well as third-party commercial applications, as well as a new board support development kit and wireless interface layer that can be used in Qualcomm's converged solution.

At that time, Qualcomm's 7XXX series MSM chipset already had a dual-core architecture, integrated an ARM 11 application processor and an ARM 9 modem, as well as a LaunchPad technology suite; the latter could provide hardware-accelerated multimedia capabilities, support megapixel photography, 3D graphics, and assisted GPS engine technology.

It is worth mentioning that in the first quarter of 2007, Qualcomm had become the world's largest wireless chip provider, and it overthrew another world-leading semiconductor company, Texas Instruments.

Of course, the final outcome was that Windows Mobile was squeezed out by Symbian OS, Android and other operating systems. Later, when Microsoft made Windows Phone, Qualcomm's Snapdragon series still supported it; especially after Microsoft acquired Lumia, Qualcomm's SoC was still used.

Therefore, it can be said that Microsoft and Qualcomm have been partners for more than ten years, but they have never formed a long-term and stable alliance like Microsoft and Intel.

Microsoft's Windows on ARM strategy

For a long time, the cooperative relationship between Microsoft and Intel has been very solid. This relationship runs through the development process of the PC Internet, and its technical foundation is Intel's X86 architecture.

However, in the era of mobile Internet, under the impact of iOS and iPad tablets, Microsoft launched a streamlined (or castrated) version of the Windows RT operating system specifically for the ARM architecture at the operating system level, and also began the difficult expansion towards the ARM platform at the hardware core level.

In June 2012, Microsoft released a product called Surface RT in Los Angeles. It is a new device that combines the form factors of a laptop and a tablet. In terms of operating system, it can only support programs in the Microsoft App Store, but cannot run traditional Windows exe applications.

More importantly, the Surface RT is equipped with the Tegra 3 T30 quad-core processor launched by NVIDIA, which is an ARM-based processor with great advantages in power consumption but reduced performance. At the same time, Microsoft also launched the Surface Pro, which is still equipped with an Intel processor and a complete Windows operating system.

The situation of the second generation is similar to that of the first generation. Surface RT 2 uses Tegra 4 T40 processor, while Surface Pro 2 still cooperates with Intel. However, perhaps because of the castration of Windows RT on the system, users are not satisfied with the Surface RT series, and Microsoft also confirmed the discontinuation of Surface 2 on January 28, 2015.

By the third generation, both Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 were equipped with the full version of Windows operating system and Intel processors were used in hardware. In other words, Microsoft's first attempt to migrate to the ARM platform through Windows RT and Surface RT ultimately failed.

However, Microsoft did not give up, especially after its new generation operating system Windows 10 was born and quickly won many users with its free strategy.

On December 8, 2016, Qualcomm, which has never been associated with PCs, suddenly appeared at the WinHEC hardware conference held in Shenzhen, China. Microsoft officially announced that Windows 10 will fully support the ARM ecosystem and will use Qualcomm as a partner; hardware partners will be able to launch Windows 10 PCs powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, and these devices will be able to run Win32 desktop applications based on the x86 architecture and universal Windows applications.

It is understood that the reason why Windows 10 can fully support ARM chips is that it uses an emulator to run Win32 programs. Of course, in the development of Windows 10, the performance of ARM processors has been continuously improved. Its number of instructions per cycle (IPC), number of cores and threads, as well as connection options and integration are very high and are constantly being optimized; and in the ARM camp, Qualcomm Snapdragon series has become the standard for mobile flagship devices.

At WinHEC, Microsoft and Qualcomm also demonstrated Windows 10 running on Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. Whether it was playing videos, taking notes in the Edge browser, image processing, running games, or Office, the operation was quite smooth.

By 2017, Qualcomm had entered the Snapdragon 835 era. On May 31, 2017, at the 2017 Taipei International Computer Show, Qualcomm announced that ASUS, HP and Lenovo became the first OEM manufacturers to use Snapdragon 835 to develop mobile PCs.

After half a year of progress, at the Qualcomm Technology Summit, the ultra-light two-in-one notebook ASUS NovaGo and the detachable HP ENVY X2, two Windows 10 devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 platform, finally made their debut; with a slight performance compromise, these two devices can achieve a battery life of more than a full day.

It looks like, through Qualcomm, Windows 10 has finally been integrated with ARM.

Microsoft and Intel's relationship is over? Don't worry

It should be pointed out that the cooperation between Microsoft and Qualcomm is not just as simple as Windows 10 on Snapdragon 835. The two parties also cooperate in the server field. In March 2017, Microsoft announced that it would replace the technology on its data center infrastructure, abandoning its old partner Intel and instead cooperating with Qualcomm and Cavium to integrate ARM-based processors into its servers.

So, is the relationship between Microsoft and Intel going to fall apart? No.

The cooperation between Microsoft and Intel is based on the interests of each other. In the high-end Windows PC market, Intel's high-performance processors still play an irreplaceable role; in fact, although the Snapdragon 835 can support Windows 10 and has advantages in battery life, it is easy to encounter bottlenecks in performance; therefore, it can only pose a threat to Intel in the field of mid- and low-end notebooks that focus on mobility and long battery life, while high-performance notebooks, desktop PCs and workstations are still Intel's home turf.

It can be seen that Qualcomm's entry is only a small threat to the relationship between Intel and Microsoft, but it is far from fatal; the two parties have formed an effective complementary relationship for the Windows 10 ecosystem. Of course, Intel's interests will inevitably be eroded in the process, but Microsoft also avoids the danger of over-dependence on Intel by doing so.

In fact, Microsoft and Intel's cooperation on Windows 10 has remained very close recently.

Also at the 2016 WinHEC conference, after announcing its partnership with Qualcomm, Microsoft and Intel jointly announced Project Evo. The two parties will conduct in-depth cooperation in augmented reality, games, Cortana and Windows Hello.

At the Taipei Computer Show in June 2017, Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm announced the Always Connected PC program; laptops based on this program will support eSIM technology and can access the Internet anytime and anywhere. Intel is not absent from this program, and it provides XMM 7260 and the new generation XMM 7360 baseband. As for Qualcomm, there is no need to say more; the Surface Pro LTE launched by Microsoft not long ago uses Qualcomm's X16 baseband.

In addition, if we focus on the server market, Intel's Xeon processors are still widely used by Microsoft; and through the acquisition of Altera in the field of FPGA chips, Intel is also closely related to Microsoft's business in the field of artificial intelligence. In late November, Microsoft announced an artificial intelligence platform called Project Brainwave, which uses Intel's Stratix 10 FPGA chip to handle complex calculations.

Of course, overall, under the tide of mobile Internet and artificial intelligence, Qualcomm, which started out in the mobile industry, is getting closer and closer to Microsoft, and the relationship between the latter and Intel is inevitably affected.

In the foreseeable future, Microsoft's cooperation with Intel will continue, but its relationship with Qualcomm will also continue to deepen; and Qualcomm and Intel are likely to have friction. However, looking at it from the other side, the market is changing rapidly, and even Intel has begun to gradually embrace ARM, so what is impossible?

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.