Is Microsoft cheating on Intel with ARM?

The Wintel marriage has been a successful one for over 30 years. So, why does Microsoft suddenly want to see other CPUs? Think of the children.

We've seen it happen with all married couples, time and time again. It tends to happen in milestone decades -- 10 years, frequently 20. The two begin to grow apart. They no longer have shared interests, and often what keeps them together -- the children -- have left the nest.

Like "Brangelina," there is a celebrity couple whose marriage is on the rocks, and that couple is Microsoft and Intel.

Now going on for 30-plus years, "Wintel" is the power couple that solidified our technology industry.

There has never been a partnership more pervasive, more important, and more influential than any other between two technology companies. Perhaps even between two companies in any industry.

Intel x86 chip architecture and advancements drove the development of Windows. Advancements in Windows drove developments in Intel chips. In that relationship, it's very hard to say who is the heavy. In many ways, Wintel is a partnership of equals.

But now, Microsoft wants to make PCs that use Qualcomm chips based on the ARM architecture.

Naturally, Intel is very concerned. While not so much saying that it's ready to hire an expensive divorce lawyer and wants to file for custody, it has indicated that it exercised its legal muscle in the past when its children are threatened -- and will do so again.

But seeing other CPUs is not a new thing for Microsoft, and Intel has often looked the other way when Redmond had its occasional dalliances, because they weren't real threats to the marriage.

In the 1990s, Windows NT was developed to be an architecturally agnostic OS. It ran on MIPS, PowerPC, DEC Alpha, and of course, Intel's Itanium chips.

When the smartphone revolution occurred, Microsoft ported Windows CE and eventually Windows 10 Mobile running on the NT kernel to ARM.

But, in both of these cases, Intel was an active participant. Intel had a vested interest in making Windows architecturally agnostic, because, with StrongARM/XScale and Itanium, it was investing in its own future and additional lines of business.

It was adding spice to the marriage, so to speak.

None of these other players were a particular threat to Intel, because you had to recompile all your applications to make them run on those platforms. The PC industry then, like today, was dominated by software that was optimized for x86 systems.

Desktop-style Windows was ported to ARM for the original Surface RT that used NVIDIA Tegra chips several years ago. It was memory constrained, sluggish, and could only run modern apps from the Windows Store and built-in desktop versions of Office recompiled from Win32.

Intel had no reason to worry. The market rejected Windows RT and Surface RT. Microsoft shelved it, continued its development of x86-based Surface devices, and moved on to other things, including making Windows more touch-friendly and improving developer tools.

Flash forward four years. Microsoft is again looking to make Windows platform-agnostic. It has been courting Qualcomm not just for the possibility of making ARM-based Windows systems but also in its Azure cloud.

What gives?

Well, ARM SoCs are now that much more powerful, being able to run 64-bit apps and address larger amounts of memory and use more processor cores. They are finally approaching desktop-chip levels of performance.

Just take a look Apple's latest-generation iPad Pros that are shipping this week, that use the 64-bit, hex-core A10X SoC.

An apt comparison to Intel would be a V6 Chevy Camaro versus the turbo-aspirated, 4-cylinder 2.0L version -- which I have had a lot of fun driving lately.

Yes, the V6 is perhaps more satisfyingly louder (to those that like loud as opposed to a sleeper) and has a faster top-end speed, but the 4-cylinder turbo is torquier, has almost as much horsepower, and has much better gas mileage.

And if you tune the thing, with upgraded pipes? Well