I’ve been saying this for years, if anyone else can produce an ARM CPU for PCs with anything near the performance of Apple Silicon, it’s going to be tough times for Intel and AMD. Several recent announcements have heralded that this future arriving in summer 2024.
Why is Apple Silicon a big deal? First since it’s release at the end of 2020 Apple has transitioned it’s entire lineup from Intel processors to Apple Silicon. This was a bad loss for Intel because despite Apple’s PC market share (by units) was only 7.6% in 2020 all those losses were in the over $1,000 part of the PC market, where Intel likely earns a disproportionate amount of its PC margin.
But the real problem is that Apple Silicon has been by far the highest performance “per watt” CPUs available. This means they can provide high performance with much lower power requirements. Specifically Apple claims Apple Silicon offers three times the performance at the same power requirements as Intel. And real world performance has clearly demonstrated the gulf is very large, and has shown no signs of shrinking significantly. Why is this? The x86 architecture dates back to the Intel 8086 from 1976. Its instruction set has grown in complexity by leaps and bounds over nearly 50 years. It’s likely Intel and AMD are trapped by an architecture that’s far less malleable and requires compatibility with an enormous base of historic software than the ARM architecture, which is relatively new and that always targeted power efficiency.
Apple just announced they are shipping their third generation of Apple Silicon, the “M3” based on TSMC’s latest 3nm process and the initial performance benchmarks are very impressive. Apple claims its not only much faster than the previous generations, but it provides M1 peak performance levels at half the power requirement. For example right now a 16 inch MacBook Pro at same price as a Dell XPS 17 offers significantly better performance with roughly twice the battery life. Because of Apple’s now unmatched laptop value proposition given by Apple Silicon, Mac market share has increased from that 7.6% to nearly 10%, costing Intel more sales in the high end PC market.
Microsoft competes directly with MacBooks using its Surface line, and like all PC laptop makers it is struggling because of that huge performance per watt disadvantage. Surface has its own ARM based product, the RT, but like all ARM based PCs it suffers from the low performance of non-Apple ARM CPUs. Well Qualcomm has just changed that. Its Elite-X will be released in volume next summer with performance better than the base Apple M3, and close to the M3 Pro.
It is almost certain that next summer will see the Elite-X turn the RT from the worst to the best performer in the Surface lineup while also giving it the best battery life. Surface also establishes new Windows hardware designs for other Windows PC manufacturers can adopt. They will be forced to prioritize building Windows ARM laptops in order to become competitive in laptops again.
Windows ARM is a relatively mature version of Windows that also can run x86 Windows applications in emulation. The previous Surface RT’s poor processor performance made its emulator experience poor as well but Elite X will change that. This means that like Apple’s Mac ARM transition moving customers from Intel to ARM will likely be far easier than expected. The Windows laptop market should be dominated by ARM laptops within five years if Qualcomm’s processors can maintain a large performance per watt advantage over x86.
This isn’t just about Intel losing most of the laptop market. ARM also runs far cooler because of its low power requirements. You can see how useful this can be in desktop PCs when looking at Apple’s 24 inch iMac and Mac Studio designs, giving manufacturers the ability to pack high performance into smaller and more aesthetically appealing packages. But where low heat generation really pays off is in places where CPUs are packed most tightly. And that’s in server hosting.
ARM is better for tightly packed hosting servers because the facility needs less cooling and less power. Amazon Graviton was already leading the inexorable march of ARM taking over server hosting. There are two issues for ARM in server hosting. One is that ARM server CPUs haven’t scaled to performance levels as high as Intel and AMD server CPUs can. But that looks to be changing. Qualcomm isn’t targeting hosting facilities with the Elite-X, but it is with ARM CPUs designed by its most intriguing acquisition, a startup of former Apple chip engineers called Nuvia. Whether its Amazon Graviton or Qualcomm Nuvia designed CPUs, ARM designs have the headroom for high performance. Apple has shown this in their M2 Ultra, where they’ve been able to scale to 24 cores and performance on par with multi-thousand dollar AMD Epyc server CPUs.
One other impediment for an entire ARM take-over is virtualization. Lots of server engineers run x86 virtual images from their x86 servers on their local x86 PC. If they have ARM virtual images from ARM servers and an x86 PC, that’s an annoying complication if not a non-starter. Same if they have an ARM PC and x86 images. But these problems are going fade over time as Windows ARM laptops and ARM servers become commonplace.
If you take anything from this, just know that Intel must not allow the performance per watt gap to persist, or it (sales in laptops, PCs and servers) will be annihilated !