IDF Fall 2006: Intel gives Microsoft the cold shoulder

 

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By David Fearon, San Francisco

Posted on 27 Sep 2006 at 10:09

Confirming that we live in interesting times, Intel President and CEO Paul Ottelini's opening IDF keynote speech featured an unusual guest. For the first time, a representative of Apple made an appearance at this, the most important event of the week. But representatives of Microsoft and its rival operating system were nowhere to be seen.

Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide marketing for Apple, appeared on stage to confirm the completion of Apple's migration to Intel processors across its product range. The introduction of the dual-core Xeon-equipped Mac Pro this month signals the end of the company's use of IBM's PowerPC chips.

This gave Schiller an opportunity to plug OS X - complete with 20-foot images of the operating system's logo on the screens above him.

But in the whole of the rest of the keynote there was no emphasis on what the new processors could do for Vista, and in fact there was little more than a passing mention of Microsoft's biggest product for ten years, let alone 20-foot logos.

When it came time for Intel's Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner to take the stage, the trend continued. Rattner's keynote focus was the advent of the 'megacenter' - data centres able to cope with the massive demands of serving up the new generation of web-based applications, and hosting bandwidth-intensive sites like YouTube. His slides focussed on the coming era of applications that would be "streamed, not installed". His main guest was another of Microsoft's emerging rivals: Luiz Barroso of Google. Barroso talked about the challenges of producing web applications, applications that the company clearly hopes will reduce reliance on heavyweight local operating systems like Vista.

While this might not signal the beginning of a concerted Intel move away from Microsoft operating systems, at the very least it represents a lack of even-handedness on the part of Intel that Microsoft could rightfully construe as a bit rude. At worst it could be interpreted as a tacit ploy for Intel to distance itself from Vista until it's been fully proved that the new OS is robust enough for mass deployment in the medium term.