Will Windows 10 be the tide that raises both Intel and Microsoft?

Only if it is clearly better than existing OS products at doing the same job and actually makes users HAPPY to use it.

Will Windows 10 cause all the MS lovers out there to upgrade their hardware?   Well, no since Win 10 runs on old hardware too it could just be a software bump to replace all the OS stuff that MS has so graciously stopped supporting.

Will it be sold in family packs?   Yes, I hope so --- cheaply too I hope.

I may bum an instance from my daughter who will buy a pack to keep herself and her hubby current on their work supporting machines.   Stick it on my wife's best machine so she can decide if she can live with it.

Speaking of FOSS phones, what happened to Firefox phones ???    

.... now that we have Ubuntu phone on the scene getting ready to take the same trek down the same footpath .......

Answer, a promising Firefox start up in the emerging markets just flat petered out when Android and Microsoft began to wage low end price war in the exact same emerging markets -- and then the Chinese came in droves with Cheap Cheap Cheap Chinese Android/Cyanogen rip offs that ran just dandy on the local carrier's system as a BYOP.

Also Answer, worldwide the Bring Your Own Phone rage is killing off all new to the market low end items, as you can buy a good used BYOP that is a 2 year old mainline phone (reseller rebuilt with new battery, etc) on Ebone and have a REALLY GOOD PHONE with better features for less money than any startup phone with very limited and buggy features.    

There is a worldwide organized market now for fixing up and reselling your old hand me down phone that you let Verizon hold for a mere $20 credit when you traded up last time ....

A Samsung Galaxy III is hard to compete against at the sub-$100 price point when it comes with a fresh new battery and updated software and a rebuilders one year guarantee .....  it certainly kicks the crap out of a limited feature Firefox phone or an Ubuntu phone that still isn't completely written yet.


              .....  so, recycling killed the Firefox phone .....

 
Now, let's spray some air freshener into the air to dispel the HUGE brown vapor cloud that Intel just blew out their butts and see where things really actually really are --- by checking with the people who really actually do it.

https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/4179-foundry-will-first-finfet.html



"The final session of the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (The CxO Panel) ending 1/14/2015 was the most interesting for me because executives from three of the four most influential semiconductor companies were on the panel: Dr. Goeff Yeap of Qualcomm, Dr. Jack Sun from TSMC, and Mr. Mark Bohr of Intel. Who is fourth you ask? That would be Apple of course. In my opinion the most interesting question asked of the panel was: Which foundry will be first to FinFET?

The CxO panel closes the conference with a conversation between Dan Hutcheson and several esteemed executives at a CxO level. This year, we will be examining what it takes to practically transition a new technology to manufacturing and through its yield ramp. There’s no magic in it for these execs: they have to make finFETs yield today while rolling 10nm and 7nm processes down the gangway from pathfinding into development. It is a task that has consumed many at prior nodes. They have closed their doors on Moore’s Law. Our panelists are the champions who won at these nodes and will keep moving down the scaling path. They will do this with a combination of their own internal excellence and an unparalleled ability to partner with others to align a global base of researchers and engineers — all towards hitting a specific ramp date that is exactly two years after the last one. They’re going to talk about how it’s done against a background in which every node gets bigger, faster, and riskier. They’ll provide their vision about the future, the challenges, and the opportunities.

Mark Bohr not only spoke at ISS he showed up. I sat in the row next to him and chatted with him during breaks. He was not on his phone, he paid attention and took notes. He also graciously accepted a copy of “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” and I sincerely believe he will read it.

Which Foundry will be First to FinFET according to me:

Samsung 14nm LP Q1 2015
GlobalFoundries 14nm LP Q2 2015
TSMC 16nm FF+ Q2 2015
Intel 14nm 2H 2015
UMC 14nm 1H 2016

Mark’s answer to the question by the way was “not Intel Foundry”. Another interesting comment from Mark was that Moore’s law will continue another 10 years but he says that every 10 years. Mark also explained to me the difference between the 14nm processes used for the Intel CPUs and SoCs. It really is the same process, same basic transistor structure, materials, design rules, and minimum interconnect pitches at the lower layers. The SoC version however has a wider range of devices (high-voltage and ultra-low leakage transistors) and a few more process steps. The bottom line is the processes are similar enough to run in the same "copy exact" fabs and that is quite an achievement, absolutely."

Mark Bohr, the executive in charge of Intel's foundry group says Intel won't go into real volume production on 14nm until second half of 2015.

This means MS will stall on releasing Win 10 until Intel is pushing out real production quantities of 14nm chips to put it on ....

This means Apple and ARM and Android will be shipping their 14nm ARM soc products in volume well before Intel does their Cherry Trail for at least a quarter, maybe actually perhaps even a full half a year of real prior shipments before Intel gets out there with their  ??? competitive ???  first efforts.

This looks bad for the Wintel team.               Intel has frittered away it's "technological advantage" completely at this point in time and is now running behind the power curve.


==============================================


Apple has put out their new 2016 10nm quad core A-10X chipset this past week for production quoting, with both Samsung and TSMC responding with proposed 10nm processes and their quoted pricing for the doing the whole business.  

Apple will likely NOT split the pot between these two since TSMC was unable to fulfill their quoted volume for 20nm A-8 which meant Apple had to go back to Samsung for the balance of 20nm A-8 production which did not make Apple happy with TSMC.   By then Samsung had a better yielding 20nm process actually up and running so Samsung actually filled a large chunk of the A-8 production amounts.

(Apple then gave the 2015 14nm A-9 quoted business solely to the Samsung/Global Consortium as TSMC had no running 14nm process to base a quote upon and as such TSMC got denied as an A-9 vendor).  

TSMC is not seen as a totally reliable Apple quoter, in other words, and one really has to question their ability to leap from 20nm all the way down to 10nm in a single bound.    

TSMC is currently suing Samsung for taking most of last year's Apple A-8 business away from them in the hopes of getting some Samsung 10nm production technology sharing as part of the final lawsuit settlement ....   TSMC needs the tech boost from the superior Samsung/Global/IBM technology.

And Intel is not seen as player yet in the 10nm world AT ALL WHATSOEVER right now -- certainly they did not quote the Apple A-10X RISC soc business as the other players did do.


WARNING:  Apple may really actually plan to go over to ARM on the lower end laptops with the 2016 A-10X generation, a move that has been rumored widely in the Apple community in the last few months as the A-10X laptop chip is going to be a BEASTLY POWERFUL RISC processor.    

Intel may be tapped only for their Core i7 equivalent very upper end 14nm chipsets to go into the very highest level of Apple Mac brand laptops and desktops.  

So, Intel might lose 60-70% of their Apple volume in other words .....

ODDS OF THIS HAPPENING GO UP DRASTICALLY if Intel is a half year late again with producing Apple's 2015 Skylake laptop chipsets ..... and especially if Intel can't meet it's promised price points.

Here is an Apple analyst saying that Intel might well get denied next year just like TSMC did this year for failing to meet this year's production dates.    I don't know where he got the graph, but that graph doesn't look good for Intel if they bobble their SkyLake hail mary pass this year.  

This graph shows Apple having contingency planning and the chip generations planned out right now to go away from Intel by 2016.

           http://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/01/14/future-macs-could-use-apple-made-chip...

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/14/apple-may-shun-intel-for-custom-a-s...

"Of course, a switch from Intel processors to custom ARM chips would be a major transition for Apple, not only in terms of hardware, but also software for its OS X platform. One rumor from earlier this year claimed that Apple had built a "completely equivalent" OS X operating system in ARM, with several prototype machines already said to have been developed.

Specifically, it was said that Apple has developed an iMac desktop with four or eight 64-bit quad-core CPU cores, while a Mac mini is said to have been made with four such cores. In addition, it was claimed that Apple has developed a 13-inch MacBook sporting up to eight 64-bit quad-core ARM chips CPU cores.

Apple already made a switch along these lines once, in a massive transition from IBM's PowerPC chips to Intel's line of processors. That switch proved beneficial to Apple, allowing its machines to run Windows and also tapping into Intel's speedier chips, and as a result Mac sales went to new highs."

Take a memo:   When MS puts out a Win 10 ARM version for tablets then Apple can dump Intel with no downside to those who want to run Office on their Mac as MS will support ARM natively at that point in time.   The ARM based Mac will be able to run all the necessary MS softwares natively at that point ....  especially since you can now find MS Office versions sitting in both the ARM Playstore and in the Apple Marketplace.

Plus, the Mac's Bootcamp was always a pure software based emulator anyway, so it could emulate Windows x86 on the A-10 processor just as well as it ever could previously on an Intel/Mac chipset.


 

Them Mac boys might be getting cores and quad-cores all confused in their heads because they simply don't realize they aren't the same thing .....  they are "it just works" Mac guys after all.

Meanwhile, MS's attack plan against Chromebooks is in full swing, with people actually buying Win 8.1 Chrome Killer machines spec'd with not enough memory and not enough processor to work very well.

Folks think they love their Windows enough to make up for the slack, but what they are finding out is that slow and slower wears VERY quickly on the nerves.   Once a chrome killer starts to accumulate some industry standard bloatware and mostly fills up its minimal drive space with local loaded games and programs, it slows down to be unusable fairly quickly.    

Yes, Virginia -- MS OS products do slow down naturally as the system accumulates poorly integrated updates, the registry gets ugly and the patchwork becomes even more patchy over time.  

A full drive can become PAINFULLY slow as it loses the space to write a larger file without stopping to shift other things around to have enough room to do it ......  and remember, the biggest files on your PC are your registry files which are always getting added to and replaced every single day of your life.    

Once your MS OS decides to fragment your larger files, things get really really really slow since every read and every write get involved in dealing with split files.

All this is doing is making it painfully clear that Win 8.1 is just a porky slow "ever growing" OS compared to Mac OS and to Chrome OS when you run it on competitive sized hardware.  

Those with enough money are running to Mac in droves.

The world is quickly learning that "local load" MS products require a lot of resources compared to Web based products.    Of the things available now that run off the web, Chromebooks sets the performance pace with Chrome Killers coming up further and further behind in most aspects.


=========================


Microsoft is learning along with everybody else .... a bit more quickly since starting up the Chrome Killer class of Win 8.1 laptops to be sure, but learning all the same.

There is yet another rewrite of Win 10 choking its way through MS -- this time actually intending to go for some speed and better use of resources.       Finally.  

MS realizes that if they drop what they got for Win 10 right now into the current marketplace it will lose yet again -- so it is try try try try try again time at MS.

MS is also finally telling the truth about "the free Windows 10"  --  not really free at all, just free for the first 6 months after you get it in FALL of 2015, after which the subscription fees begin in 2016.

Will Win 10 be good enough?    Not right now ..... but there is time enough to try try yet again.

HOWEVER, Win 10 is good enough to cause Apple to do better.   Win 10  is good enough to cause Google to do better.    Thank you MS, for getting our favorite vendors to do better even more quickly than before.

Is Win 10 good enough to be your one and only computing venue?    No.

That boat has sailed --- people like their tablets for casual consumption.   People like their phones for casual consumption.   People use PCs at work or for sitting down whacking away at work stuff at home.  

Yes, you can use a PC to do everything --- but you already have the phone and you already have the tablet.

And in some cases you already have your Chromebook too .....