By 2026, ARM chips will control 30% of the PC market. In the same timeframe, he also expects that half of the cloud server business, which is currently dominated by x86 CPUs, would switch over to ARM processors. What does this mean for gaming PCs, though?
It will all be “an incredible, industry-changing event that is not taken seriously enough,” according to the president and CEO of Canalys.
ARM chips may already be found in a sizable portion of the market, depending on how you define a PC. ARM-based CPUs are currently found in almost all Apple Macs. Surprisingly, Apple holds a 13.5% market share for PCs. Additionally, several low-cost Chromebooks contain ARM processors.
Other analysts are a little more conservative when it comes to ARM’s overall market share in PC. But another analyst firm, Mercury Research, still believes ARM’s share of PC processors has doubled from his 7% in mid-2021 to his just over 13% today. Any way you look at it, it’s a steep rise.
Of course, your Mac or Chromebook doesn’t have to be your primary gaming rig. But what Apple’s M1 and M2 chips have certainly proven is that ARM can compete with traditional x86 CPUs in raw performance.
Qualcomm, on the other hand, has made big claims about its own new custom Oryon ARM core, which is due next year. They are designed exclusively for Windows machines and Qualcomm’s goal is to compete with Apple’s M1 and M2 chips.
If Qualcomm succeeds in this, by default it will be able to compete with Intel and AMD’s x86 chips in terms of performance. Then the problem becomes one of software support. Porting games (and other important software such as graphics drivers) from x86 to ARM can be quite a pain.
So while it’s entirely possible that the majority of the PC market will be running on ARM within a few years, we believe gaming PCs will take much longer to make the leap. ARM-powered gaming PCs are one of the much-discussed new technologies that are always on the horizon. It’s been predicted for a long time, but apparently never came close.