SONNY and Cher, Bert and Ernie, Hepburn and Tracey, Abbot and Costello, all famous duos through the ages. But is the duo of Intel and Windows starting to lose its mutual attraction?

While most media this week spent a considerable amount of time analysing the breakup of some young Londoner and his girlfriend, another duo in the tech world seems to be having issues with their relationship. Microsoft and Intel have been the best of buddies for decades and the rise of the personal computer saw both companies become super-rich as a result. Affectionately called Wintel by some analysts, they beat super celebrity couples like Brangelina, Bennifer and Posh and Becks by years for their notoriety (in the tech world at least). However, things seem to be changing in recent years and they appear to be becoming a bit more distant from each other.

The cracks of the Wintel relationship were starting to form for years, with Intel showing more and more interest in getting with other technology companies. As a result, last year Apple announced that it was moving over on to the Intel platform for all their laptops and Mac personal PCs. Big business for Intel and a nice performance boost for Apple customers.

Now Intel were happy to be with both Microsoft and Apple. To keep business going though, Intel still needs to build more relationship with vendors as AMD eat more and more into their PC microchip business. With Apple not using Intel chips in their soon-to-belaunched iPhone, Intel once again had to start the vendor dating game.

Intel weren't standing still and this week, at their Chinese developer conference, they announced new powerful and energy efficient chips that can be used in new mobile devices and that they are doing deals with various technology companies to use these chips in various portable devices.

These Intel wonder-chips will have the processing power of a mini-computer in a small space and will also have Wifi, Wimax (which Intel has heavily invested in) and bluetooth built in, while battery time will outclass existing chips.

There is also talk that the chips will have satellite/GPS capabilities and video processing abilities so television signals can be received. Videos have been leaked to YouTube of these new devices that look very much like the Apple iPhone with interfaces and applications which are very un-Windowslike. Intel have made it quite clear they want to work with anyone that wants to build competing products to the iPhone.

Intel last year worked with Microsoft to build mobile devices that used a special, slimmed down version of Windows XP, dubbed "Project Origami". These devices were later rebranded and released with the very unsexy named UMPC . . . Ultra Mobile PC. The pricetag for this nifty mobile device has meant, though, that sales have been quite poor and not a lot of units have been shifted.

The latest Intel mobile gadgets will be cheaper and smaller than the Microsoft UMPC devices. This weeks announcement makes no mention of the Origami project and what is sure to break Microsoft's heart are rumours that Intel have been working on building a version of the Linux open-source operating system to run on the Intel devices which could lower the cost of the devices even more and thus make them even more attractive to consumers. While they have confirmed a version of Windows Vista will run on these devices, Intel have been slightly ambiguous about the Linux versions.

An additional departure for Intel is that they have also been writing their own applications for these devices, something which was the sole domain of Microsoft. In a bid to appeal to the untapped Chinese market, the Intel development office in Shanghai has been working on character recognition software for western and Chinese characters, as well as images and patterns to enable new types of user interfaces, and they may even license this software.

While it might have been bad enough that Intel are working with other other companies without insisting they use Windows, Intel making and licencing their own software is certainly a slap in the face for the Microsoft.

Microsoft themselves haven't been feeling all glum over all of this. With the first version of the X-Box and the latest version, they used bitter Intel rivals AMD as well as IBM to develop chips for their gaming consoles and they have been doing business for years with chip designer ARM whose chips are in most of the world mobile phones.

While the relationship between Intel and Microsoft is not as close and as loving as before, it will be of immense benefit to other technology companies as well as consumers. All these new links and partnerships mean more competition, more innovation and more value for money. For consumers at least, breaking up duos is good.

WHAT A DEAL

In a rather impressive stunt this week, Infosecurity Europe convinced many office workers to part with their password in exchange for a chocolate bar. We've been so impressed that we'll give any reader one Moro chocolate bar in exchange for the contents of their wallet. * Couldn't be fairer than that, right?

(* Wallet must contain at least 20. )