Arm CEO Rene Haas is optimistic that Arm's share in the Microsoft Windows PC market will reach over 50% within the next five years.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon agreed with this prediction and revealed that some OEMs are already planning for notebooks equipped with Arm-based Snapdragon processors to account for 60% of their Windows PC sales within the next three years.
The CEOs of both Qualcomm and Arm recently visited Taiwan and delivered keynote speeches at Computex 2024. In an exclusive interview with Reuters, Haas expressed his genuine belief that Arm could achieve over 50% market share in the Windows market within five years.
He also emphasized that Qualcomm designed the first Arm architecture-based chip on the market, bringing new Windows on Arm PC devices to consumers and enterprise users. He believes that other manufacturers will follow suit.
Arm is already the mainstream architecture in the smartphone processor sector and has been actively exploring other markets in recent years. If Arm, following its adoption in Apple's M-series processors, can further establish itself in the Windows market, it would cause a disruptive change in the entire PC market landscape, which has long been dominated by Intel and AMD's x86 architecture processors.
According to a report by Tom's Hardware, when asked by the media whether Arm's 50% market share target is realistic and how much Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors can contribute to this, Amon expressed his approval and support for Haas' statement, stating that Qualcomm is working hard towards this goal.
Amon revealed that there are some differences in wording among various OEMs. However, "their (OEMs) views on this are changing. Some OEMs believe they could account for 40-60% of their total sales within the next three years. I've also seen some OEMs say 50%." He emphasized that these are all business opportunities for Qualcomm.
Amon further explained that this is important because, in the past, every time a new version of the Windows operating system was released, it typically took a long time for it to be widely adopted in the PC market. For example, some enterprises are still using Windows 10 now. It also took a very long time for those using Windows 7 to transition to Windows 10.
However, this transition of Windows PCs to Copilot+ AI PCs is very different from before. Copilot+ PCs will bring productivity improvements and new use cases; the scope covered by Copilot product packages has also become more comprehensive.
Therefore, it is expected that this Windows PC transition will be popularized faster and have better sales performance than all previous versions of Windows, and Qualcomm "is working through various means to try and bring the Arm ISA-based Orion CPU into the industry."
From Amon's remarks, it is clear that he is confident in the exploration of the AI PC market using Arm architecture and Snapdragon processors. Major manufacturers such as Asus, Dell, and HP have recently launched Copilot+ PC models equipped with Snapdragon X Elite processors. The configuration of the Snapdragon X Elite processor features the Arm ISA-based Oryon CPU and an NPU specifically designed for AI workloads.
