Industry analyst Canalys predicts ARM chips will get stuck 30% of the PC market by 2026. (opens in new tab) And half of the cloud server market, currently dominated by x86 CPUs, (opens in new tab) It is also classified as an ARM processor in the same time frame. But what does that mean for gaming PCs?
Canalys President and CEO Steve Brazier believes the whole thing will lead to “an extraordinary, industry-changing event that hasn’t been taken seriously enough.”
Depending on how you define a PC, ARM chips are already in a good chunk of the market. Almost all Apple Macs now use ARM-based CPUs. (opens in new tab) Apple also has a staggering 13.5% share of the PC market. ARM chips are also used in various inexpensive Chromebooks.
Other analysts are somewhat conservative when it comes to ARM’s overall market share in PCs. But another analyst organization, Mercury Research, believes ARM’s share of PC processors has doubled from his 7% in mid-2021 to just over 13% today. Any way you look at it, it’s a steep rise.
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Of course, your Mac or Chromebook doesn’t have to be your main gaming rig.But what are Apple’s M1 and M2 chips (opens in new tab) It certainly proved that ARM can compete with traditional x86 CPUs in raw performance. This was previously untrue.
Qualcomm, on the other hand, makes a big claim of its own A new custom-designed Oryon ARM core will be released next year. (opens in new tab) These are built specifically for Windows machines and Qualcomm’s aim is to compete with Apple’s M1 and M2 chips.
If Qualcomm achieves that, it will be competing with x86 chips from Intel and AMD by default in terms of pure performance. Then the problem becomes one of software support. Porting games (and other important software such as graphics drivers) from x86 to ARM requires a lot of effort.
So while it’s quite 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 he one of the highly talked about new technologies that are always on the horizon. It’s been predicted for a long time, but it doesn’t seem that close in reality.
