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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

Interesting point. This would suggest pretty sizable synergies from the oft-rumored Microsoft acquisition of Intel.

Microsoft doesn't need to acquire Intel, they need to do what Apple did and acquire a stellar ARM design house that will build a chip with x86 translation, tailored to accelerate the typical workloads on Windows machines and sell those chips to the likes of Dell and Lenovo and tell developers "ARM Windows is the future, x86 Windows will be sunset in 5 years and no longer supported by us, start porting your apps ASAP and in the mean time, try our X86 emulator on our ARM silicon, it works great."

Microsoft proved with the XBOX and Surface series they can make good hardware if they want, now they need to move to chip design.

Microsoft has a pretty good relationship with AMD from the Xbox. AMD already made an Arm Opteron. Windows has been multiplatform since NT 3.1 (Alpha, MIPS) and then in 3.51 adding in PowerPC. You can download Windows for Arm for free and run in on a Raspberry Pi.

Microsoft has at least one homegrown processor that it has ported Windows and Linux to with the confusingly named 'Edge'.

https://www.theregister.com/2018/06/18/microsoft_e2_edge_win...

Microsoft doesn't even _need_ to target Arm, they could easily team up with AMD or go the whole thing solo and target anything from RISC-V, Arm to an in-house ISA.

> Windows has been multiplatform since NT 3.1 (Alpha, MIPS) and then in 3.51 adding in PowerPC.

What was the last version of Windows to support either of these platforms?

PowerPC was the last architecture standing. It was supported by NT 4.0 SP2 (technically this means Microsoft supported it on paid support contracts as recently as 2006).

Windows Server 2008 R2 supported Itanium.

There are rumors of Ryzen CPUs with ARM ISA, but I think AMD has enough on its plate.

Apple has at most 10% of the computer market and is just one player among many. I am skeptical Microsoft with their 90% dominance would or should be allowed this much power over the industry.

The traditional personal computer market isn't nearly as important as it used to be. However you slice the pie, there's no way you can define the pieces to be 10% Apple and 90% Microsoft with a straight face.

90% dominance of what is increasingly a small niche market. Apple controls a large fraction of the mobile device market, and everything else runs linux.

The fact is outside of the tech scene, most businesses and consumers runs Windows. To say this is a "small niche market" is laughable. Microsoft is everywhere.

Compare how many millions of desktop PCs there are in the world, versus the billions of mobile devices.

From what I understand, Microsoft is excellent at hardware design. They’re just focused on a different market (services->business rather than consumers->services)

> Microsoft acquisition of Intel

Could that possibly be approved by governments?

Nope. Not a lawyer but I doubt it at all.

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