Chip companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD are all either planning or said to be planning another attempt at making Arm chips for the consumer PC market. Qualcomm is leading the charge in mid-2024 with its Snapdragon X Elite and a new CPU architecture called Oryon. And Reuters reported earlier this week that Nvidia and AMD are targeting a 2025 release window for their own Arm chips for Windows PCs.
If these companies successfully get their chips into PCs, it would mostly come at Intel’s expense. But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger doesn’t seem worried about it yet, as he said on the company’s most recent earnings call.
The biggest issue for Windows on ARM will be, as always, application compatibility. ARM applications haven’t exactly been pouring in for Windows, and translation layers in Windows haven’t been earth-shattering either. As long as this problem remains, Intel indeed has little to worry about.
I’m just excited there’s finally some movement in ARM laptops, because Linux is exceptionally well positioned for the transition to ARM. Every major distribution has a fully functional ARM version, with pretty much full package repository support. There really is very little difference in running desktop Linux on ARM (or even POWER9, for that matter). The power of open source.
According to online lists, top selling laptop brand is Apple (depends on year and list).
Guess what architecture Apple laptops use? Intel, you guessed wrong. It is ARM.
What about contenders?
Lenovo: Has Snapdragon based Thinkpad (their top line): https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/thinkpad–x13s-(13-inch-snapdragon)/len101t0019
Dell: Has Snapdragon in “Inspiron” line (to be fair this is their “value” brand in consumer sector): https://www.dell.com/en-us/lp/qualcomm-snapdragon
Samsung: Again in the “value” sector, there are some low end offerings:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/2/22466164/samsung-galaxy-book-go-laptop-windows-arm-snapdragon-price-specs
So, depending on the brand, you have everything from starter, cheaper laptops, to high end premium with various ARM chipsets.
Servers? Well, to be fair, ARM did not make a huge dent in the public facing one. However internal users had long been rumored to have them. And now Amazon AWS offers them at competitive prices:
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
I do like Intel, and want them to be around. But being being arrogant is probably not the way to do it.
That’s a dishonest way to cherry pick stats – by focusing on brands you’re disguising Intel CPU’s market dominance by splitting it across the large number of brands.
The relevant statistic would be “CPU manufacturer” not “laptop brand” because Intel has no reason to care who sells their CPUs (as long as they get sold by someone). For this; Apple’s laptops account for around 9% of the market but about half of them are the older Apple laptops with Intel CPUs; so we could probably say that for laptops it’s approximately 4% Apple CPUs and 75% Intel CPUs.
But that’s not quite helpful either; as the article is about Intel (not) worrying about Qualcomm, Nvidia or AMD; and none of those companies are Apple.
The reality is:
a) Qualcomm has been making ARM chips for ages and (with help from Microsoft) have spent years building a reputation that “Windows on ARM” tablets and laptops are cheap and nasty trash (which is also why the ARM system you mentioned are in the “value” sector). That existing reputation will persist long after it becomes undeserved.
b) Nvidia has been creating ARM systems (Tegra) for 15 years now and nobody has ever cared.
c) AMD are going to realize that competing with Intel for “high markup” x86 is a lot more profitable than mud wrestling for pennies at the bottom of the barrel, and the they’ll cancel their plans the same as they did the last time (Opteron A1100 series).
d) All of these (AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm) are fighting against Apple for TSMC’s manufacturing capacity, and continually losing, and ending up on older/worse manufacturing processes and/or limited chip supply. This is another major reason Intel doesn’t need to care much. Note that China’s relationship with Taiwan is an added concern on top .
e) If ARM actually manages to get market share, Intel will just produce ARM chips; either on behalf of other companies through “Foundry Services”, or for themselves (e.g. like Intel’s Xscale from 20 year ago).
d) ARM Holdings (the literal company, not the instruction set) is over-valued and mostly crap. For high-performance ARM’s own designs can’t compete so they only get a trickle of $ from “architectural license” deals with people like Apple and Qualcomm who do their own designs; and for low-end customers (all the tiny little embedded chips in microwave ovens, etc) they’re slowly losing to Risc-V because cost (zero licencing fees) matters more than anything else in that space.
Brendan,
It might be their PR talk, but Intel dismissing threats to their laptop segment CPUs when even AMD is has better chips, and then Snapdragon is offering even faster ones: https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-cpu-pc-benchmarks-oryon-faster-intel-13th-gen-apple-m2-max-gpu-faster-amd-rdna-3/
More so when their profit margins have essentially dropped to zero:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/profit-margins
And I am saying this as an Intel investor. That is really not projecting confidence.
Um, no. Qualcomm are spreading “marketing” about CPUs that are currently NOT being offered. By the time they’re launched (~12 months) they still won’t be available to consumers but Intel’s even faster Meteor Lake will be; and by the time consumers are actually able to buy them (maybe ~24 months) everyone will know that the benchmarks you’re looking at today were so biased that they’re essentially lies; and also that there’s a pile of other problems that make them undesirable, ranging from “too much x86 software” causing slower translation, to only being able to run “fast” for a small amount of time before getting too hot, to missing features (e.g. virtualization), to poor/no expansion options, to nasty vendor lock-in (e.g. being unable to turn off UEFI secure boot).
However; I do like the way the article’s “single-thread performance” graph claims Intel beats everything that actually exists.
Yeah. None of that has anything to do with “future ARM vs. x86” and Intel’s profit margins have already started going back up.
That’s remarkably naive. All it would take is a compelling operating platform (with backwards compat – seriously, why has no one else added the memory modes that Apple has to support x86?). Maybe that’s not Windows, but there’s also Chromebooks, there are dozens of hand held gaming devices that really could work with hybrid chips running Linux, and Desktop Linux is more viable now than I’ve ever seen it before. There’s so much room for new ideas in this space right now.
Also, the handheld gaming devices are not really having a problem with performance – battery life is the constraint. (Where’s that edit button?)
One last “edit” – it really is remarkable how fast x86 code is on Apple’s ARM chips – if you haven’t experienced it, you probably don’t know how much of a killer feature that is. It’s baffling that Redmond didn’t immediately get out their copy machines on this one. I would.