For like the last decade in the PC industry, things have been pretty boring. Intel was the major player in CPU, and Nvidia was the major player in GPUs, while AMD existed as the minor player in both sectors (in terms of marketshare). There were also some other players like Qualcomm, which supplied ARM CPU based SoCs, but their presence was nigh negligible.
However, recently Intel has officially entered the dGPU market with Intel Arc Xe Graphics. It has also allowed Intel to greatly bolster their iGPU performance.
Then recently there was a report that Nvidia is going to enter the PC CPU sector.
Nvidia’s CPU will be based on the ARM architecture. With their leading GPU technology, there is the possibility of Nvidia making a formidable SoC with integrated RTX Graphics. It’s not clear if Nvidia will use ARM’s reference Cortex cores or design their own custom cores. Even if it’s the former, I think it’s still going to be pretty competitive, as ARM’s reference designs have greatly improved in recent years.
And then there is Qualcomm who has just announced the Sanpdragon X Elite SoC for laptops
Utilising their own custom-ARM based Oryon CPUs, Qualcomm has created a formidable SoC… The single-core performance exceeds the Ryzen 9 7950X. Qualcomm has been making ARM CPUs for a while now, with the Snapdragon 8c and 7c series. However, looking it’s clear Qualcomm wasn’t taking them very seriously. The Snapdragon X Elite is different, and it looks like Qualcomm is looking to make a bang. And it seems they will, as all major Laptop OEMs have partnered with Qualcomm to make laptops with X Elite SoC.
It’s also been rumoured that Samsung and Mediatek will make ARM SoCs for PCs. It’s clear that Windows on ARM is taking off.
Then there is the AI PC. On device AI is going to become a major thing in PCs going forward, with upcoming processors from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm all having dedicated processing units for hardware acceleration of AI.
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Summary
The PC hardware industry is going to become a very interesting and exciting place in the coming years. Intel has entered the PC dGPU space, Nvidia will reportedly enter the PC CPU space and Qualcomm is looking to become major force in the industry with their Snapdragon X processors. Windows on ARM is taking off, and the era of the AI PC is here.
Arms system usually lack the standardization, common interfaces and customizability of x86 on the desktop, those are good in a vertical produced product like Apple does not in a open ecosystem like PC.
Then you got price and retrocombability (or lack of thereof) of software running on Windows. PC user don’t care for the latest super efficient CPU if they can buy last year or two years old x86 for 1/3 of the price with enough power for their standard stuff.
I don’t care for an 16 hours laptop that costs 1.6k when I can get a decent 8h ryzen laptop for 500 , I’ll buy an external battery in case.