Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market

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.