Intel Could Do Better at Designing Chips, Steve Ballmer Says

You would think that, just because two companies are active in two different market segments, they wouldn’t have bad things to say about each other, especially if said companies also happen to be two of the biggest players in the IT market, Intel and Microsoft. Well, recent reports show that at least one of the two isn’t all that supportive of the other’s products. To be more precise, software giant Microsoft believes that leading chip maker Intel isn’t all that good at providing “chips [that] run faster.”

 

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive officer, had a few, rather interesting and unsavory comments to make regarding Intel and its technologies, which he enounced at the “Technologies to Change Your Business” event in London. “Intel is running to the limit of physics in chip design,” Ballmer said, adding that, “They can still double the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months but they can’t use the traditional transistors to make the chips run faster.”

 

No one really knows what prompted Microsoft’s CEO to speak in these particular terms of Intel, especially since his acid remarks came, as The Inquirer reports, just moments after he had announced Intel as being one of the main sponsors of the event held at London’s South Bank Centre.

 

“No material, science, physics way of cooling down processors that run faster than the current processors,” Ballmer further said, continuing to question Intel's innovation.

 

In the same speech, Microsoft’s CEO said that he believed Intel should provide faster processors, instead of adding more cores – the latter being an idea he obviously did not like, as he bluntly stated, “If we were to take advantage of the hardware, just that one change mandates and necessitates ongoing OS innovation.”

 

Steve Ballmer is known for making comments of this type, which ultimately end up grabbing all the headlines. However, his most recent statements could also have a serious impact on the business relationship between the two companies, although confirmation of that happening is still pending.