Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm Holdings, thinks his company’s platform architecture could nab as much as 50 percent of the Windows PC market by 2030. That would essentially be a 400 percent leap from its current 11 percent share in a market dominated by Intel’s x86 design. Because Arm was developed for smartphones, it was driven by energy efficiency, an approach that is paying off in the era of power-hungry AI applications. Now the technology is being used for the first wave of Microsoft Copilot+ Windows laptops, and Arm has also set its sights on desktop PCs.

“Chips made by Intel have dominated the PC industry for decades and if the Arm push succeeds, it would reorder the market,” explains Reuters, noting Microsoft has made “a significant commitment” to Arm-based chips as an alternative to x86 processors supplied by Intel and AMD for its consumer devices.

Haas said that when it comes to Arm, in addition to hardware Microsoft is “very, very much committed from a software standpoint.” Apple has for the past four years been selling computers using Arm design for its M Series processors and has found they “offer long battery life and speedy performance,” Reuters adds.

Qualcomm has announced it will be first to market with Arm-based chips for Windows machines, which companies including Asus and Dell have said they will use for AI-optimized Microsoft Copilot+ laptops and PCs. Microsoft plans to use Qualcomm chips on its own Surface laptops.

Intel has its own Lunar Lake processors designed for AI applications, which are expected to start shipping in Q3.

Onstage at the Computex trade show, Haas and associates discussed how the focus on minimal power draw is as relevant today as it was when the company created the first CPU for Apple’s Newton handheld device, writes TechSpot.

“All three of the largest cloud computing providers — Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP and Microsoft’s Azure — along with Nvidia, are using or have recently announced custom chips that leverage Arm’s Neoverse server CPU IP designs” for cloud client data centers, TechSpot reports.

Microsoft Azure’s 128 Core Cobalt 100 CPU uses Arm’s Neoverse N2 design. When Arm in February announced its next gen Neoverse V3 — Neoverse N3, and Neoverse E3 — CPU cores, Tom’s Hardware hailed it as “a major development for Arm server platforms.”