Mountain Lion is supposed to be the first instance of this yearly OS X release cadence. The benefits of an aggressive release schedule are clear, the question is whether or not it's a model that will work in software like it has for Intel in hardware. Just last week, Apple announced a move to annual releases of OS X. More recently, Microsoft announced a planned shift to a 3-year OS release cadence. While the tick-tock model was somewhat unbelievable in '05 - '06, it makes a lot of sense today after more than a couple successful iterations of it. Should the competitive analysis teams have missed something, a two year cadence would make any major course correction feasible before significant marketshare was lost. The other thing tick-tock guaranteed was that Intel would only be on the hook for two years with any given architecture. ![]() Significant architecture changes every two years, separated by minor updates and process node shrinks during the interim years guaranteed that Intel's product lineup would always remain fresh. The other major change was a shift to a two-year architecture cadence, now known as the tick-tock model. Intel invested heavily in competitive analysis groups that would model the expected performance of the competition's roadmap and feed that data back into the development cycle for its own technologies. The bigger and more painful surprise was that AMD, Intel's chief competitor in the x86 CPU space, was able to gain significant marketshare for the first time in its history.įor Intel, the painful learning experience resulted in an internal mandate: no more surprises. VIA Technologies, a fairly low-cost player in the chipset business back then, was able to see real success selling chipsets to customers who were displeased with Intel's offerings. The combination of all of these factors left Intel in an extremely vulnerable state, one that its competitors were able to take advantage of. Additionally the company was experimenting with broadening its focus and shifting from a microprocessor manufacturer to a silicon manufacturer. Intel's platform strategy at the time was also guilty of making the wrong bets. ![]() In the late 1990s through the mid 2000s Intel found itself in a situation where it was heavily invested in a microprocessor architecture that ultimately had no future.
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