On November 20, 1985, Microsoft (MS) launched "Windows," an operating system (OS) for personal computers. The company had first announced a version of Windows for IBM-compatible machines in 1983, but it formally distributed Windows 1.01 worldwide two years later after fixing some of the bugs that had been a problem. Early products, which still retained the DOS system requiring command-line input, did not achieve great success. But in 1992, Windows 3.1, which completely broke away from the DOS-style command system, became a massive hit around the world. Thanks to this, MS founder Bill Gates rose to the position of the world's richest person.
Microsoft's ability to maintain its powerful dominance in the PC market owed much to its close cooperation with Intel, a central processing unit (CPU) company. Intel and MS strengthened the alliance between semiconductor chips and software, the two pillars of the PC, raising their market dominance. The global information technology (IT) industry called the combination of the CPU and Windows that led the golden age of the PC the "Wintel (MS Windows + Intel) alliance."
The Wintel system was not without its crises. The emergence of Apple's smartphone and Google's free release of its Android OS challenged the stronghold of the Wintel alliance. However, owing to its overwhelming production infrastructure, strong hardware compatibility, and the limitations of new mobile OSes, the Wintel system was able to maintain its heyday for more than 40 years.
Nvidia, the absolute leader in artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors, recently announced that it would join hands with MS to unveil an AI PC equipped with its own chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, "We are focused on a massive project to completely reinvent the PC for the first time in 40 years," adding that the company would unveil this fall an AI PC equipped with a "superchip" capable of running agentic AI on the PC. It reflects a strong determination that the future of the PC will be led not by Wintel but by "Winvida," the combination of Windows and Nvidia. This kind of change foretold for the PC market is both a new challenge and an opportunity for Korea's semiconductor industry. During this period of paradigm shift in semiconductors, if we do not stay sharply alert within the AI PC platform ecosystem, there is no telling when we could be pushed out as outsiders. If we remain intoxicated by the semiconductor boom, there is a strong risk of being left behind in the new restructuring of the landscape that the Winvida era brings.
