Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
Pat Gelsinger said on the most recent earnings call for Intel that, “Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally, they’ve been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business.” A statement which is historically true. Gelsinger went on to claim that he doesn’t see them being a threat to Intel, and that Intel has a strong roadmap and momentum.
While Pat is technically correct that ARM hasn’t been much of a force in PC sales, one only needs to look at three important trends for counter examples. First, desktop and laptop sales have been on slow decline for years, due to phones and tablets being good enough for most folks. And you know what’s in those devices? ARM chips.
Apple in particular has armed all their devices with custom silicon that in some cases outperforms the previous Intel-based x86 chips, and certainly does far better with power consumption. Seriously, I wish I could run switch from Windows to Mac, but I’ve already failed once.
Lastly, Microsoft seems pretty serious about finally bringing ARM over to Windows, with Qualcomm and Nvidia both developing ARM chips for the platform. If Windows can deliver Mac-level power consumption on an ARM CPU, there’s a serious chance of success. The biggest hurdle to switching is backwards compatibility, something that Apple had a much easier time achieving.