NVIDIA and AMD plan to launch ARM-based chips that will power Windows PCs in 2025
A report by Reuters says both NVIDIA and AMD are working on ARM-based processors that could run Windows. What's more, the first PCs to use these chips could appear as early as 2025.
This won't be the first ARM chips to run Windows. Qualcomm is currently the exclusive partner of Microsoft for ARM-based versionof Windows (see Surface Pro X), but success has so far been limited.
And over 10 years ago, NVIDIA showcased a tablet that was powered by an NVIDIA Tegra chip running Windows 8.
The report says Microsoft "plans to take aim at Apple", who has seen its market share doubled since releasing its first custom ARM-based chips for Macs three years ago.
This piece of news comes from "people familiar with the matter." But when Reuters asked NVIDIA, AMD, and Microsoft, all three declined to comment.
This is bad news for Intel who is under increasing pressure to deliver chips that can compete with Apple's own M-series chips. Intel will launch its latest generation Meteor Lake chips in December that is its "biggest architecture shift in 40 years."
Even so, there's no guarantee that ARM-based PCs will take off because all software that runs on Windows now are built for the x86 computing architecture – which has been used by the industry for decades. A transition to ARM-based chips would pose significant challenges.
When Apple transitioned to its custom chips, it used a translation software called Rosetta 2 which took apps compiled for x86 and translated them to run on its ARM-based custom chips. And a large part of Apple's success was due in no small to the effectiveness of this translator. Users need not worry about whether apps were compatible with Apple's new chips, everything just ran as normal.
Microsoft will have to tackle this issue more seriously because as promising as ARM-based Windows such as the Surface Pro X are, they are hamstrung by issues of app compatibility and performance.
Source: Reuters
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