Intel Corp (INTC)

[spaarky]

Are you suggesting that in addition to (likely illegal) exclusion of AMD processors (in exchange for money), Skype is also wrong about minimum hardware configuration set for their system?

Is it so difficult to image that Skype, looking at the target users of this app (businesses), and the market share of Intel in the business desktop/mobile space (90% + last numbers I saw), couldn't be bothered with ponying up the significant cost of validating and supporting a complex, multi-threaded application on a second platform? Validation costs are a significant portion of software development these days.

Skype and Intel signed a deal in Q3 05 to optimise for specific Intel CPUs. This is the outcome of that collaboration.

Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger said on Wednesday that the two companies were working together at the research and development level to build what he called "good business-class audio", for voice over IP networks.

"I'm happy to announce a partnership between Intel and Skype to make their clients better on our platforms using our software technology, codec technology [encoding and decoding software], and our dual-core platforms," he said during his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum. The collaboration will lead to "improvements in the number of participants in calls and the quality of calls as well", he added.

http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/voip/0,3800004463,39151702,00.htm

--spaark