ARM PC is undoubtedly a very marketable concept in recent years, especially after the popularity of AI PC, ARM PC is also considered to be its best carrying platform. A few days ago, ARM revealed in its earnings call for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 that the ARM PC market is about to usher in new suppliers. ARM CEO Rene Haas said that with the diversification of processor suppliers, the ARM PC market will officially start to grow in the next 12 to 36 months.
At present, ARM PCs have indeed ushered in explosive growth, but this is mainly due to Apple. According to the latest research report from Counterpoint Research, Apple already has a 90% share of the ARM PC market, while the so-called Windows on ARM (hereinafter referred to as WoA) is almost entirely supported by Qualcomm. Therefore, for ARM, ARM PC does need the entry of new players, after all, Qualcomm is not a good thing for the entire WoA platform.
But who is the new supplier in the mouth of the ARM CEO? The answer may be MediaTek. Not long ago, MediaTek CEO Cai Lixing revealed at the briefing that it is building a revenue source for ARM PCs. At the same time, he also confirmed that he will deliver a keynote speech at the Taipei International Computer Show on June 4, which also indicates that MediaTek may be interested in intervening in the desktop chip market. After all, Microsoft and Qualcomm signed a cooperation agreement with an exclusivity agreement, requiring OEMs to use Qualcomm's chipset when launching WoA-based laptops.
However, time has passed, and this cooperation agreement between Microsoft and Qualcomm will expire in 2025, so it also gives MediaTek the opportunity to launch ARM PC-related products. Even Morgan Stanley directly described the ARM PC chip that MediaTek will launch in the future, saying that it will operate by using TSMC's CoWoS technology and NVIDIA's NVLink interface, combining Nvidia GPU and MediaTek ARM architecture CPU, and is expected to be available in mid-2025.
With the advantages of an open ecosystem and architecture, ARM has undoubtedly become the most successful architecture in the past decade or so, and its high performance and high performance on the basis of low power consumption have also made most smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices used. So it's almost a no-brainer that ARM has made such a successful move into the desktop and then occupies the other pole of consumer electronics.
Of course, thinking and being able are not the same thing. ARM PCs have a long history, but they have been marginalized for a long time, and one of the key factors is that they are not strong enough.
As early as 2017, Qualcomm and Microsoft proposed the concept of "Always Connected PC", which led to the creation of Snapdragon laptops running the Windows on ARM operating system, but this series of Snapdragon laptops eventually repeated the mistakes of netbooks. At that time, Windows on ARM computers were still in their infancy, and even Qualcomm didn't know what such products should look like, so that at first they directly used the Snapdragon 835 used in smartphones as the chip for the Snapdragon laptop, and then the Snapdragon 8Cx was just a magic overclocking version of the Snapdragon 855.
The Snapdragon 835 and even the Snapdragon 855 are indeed worthy of the flagship platform on the mobile side, but the magic change of the flagship SoC on the mobile side to the ARM PC chip is a wrong path, and the performance of the latter can only be powerful on the desktop side. For example, the Snapdragon 850, which was overclocked from the Snapdragon 845 released in 2019, can only be compared to the Core M-5Y51 released by Intel in 2014 in terms of performance. It wasn't until the advent of Apple's Apple Silicon that the argument that the ARM architecture was incapable of high performance was outdated.
At the beginning, the design idea of ARM PC chips was based on mobile terminals, and the pursuit of lower power consumption than x86 architecture CPUs to achieve the so-called "full-time online". But the problem is that desktop users are not pursuing long battery life with low power consumption, but having enough performance to run various software is the key, from Apple Silicon to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite announced last year, all of which are based on the ARM architecture to pursue higher performance.
Morgan Stanley expects that MediaTek's ARM PC chips will use TSMC CoWoS technology based on this trend, because the latter is characterized by the advantages of high density, high speed and high reliability, which is suitable for high-performance, high-density and high-reliability performance requirements.
However, one thing may be different from what everyone thinks, the ARM PC field is ushering in new players, and it is ARM, not MediaTek, that is promoting. For MediaTek, PC chips may become the third largest source of revenue after continuing smartphones and ASICs, but even the most optimistic Morgan Stanley only expects its PC chip revenue to reach $400 million and $1 billion in 2025 and 2026 respectively, contributing 2% and 5% to MediaTek's revenue. But on the other hand, ARM is really having a hard time now.
As recently as the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, ARM's outlook for fiscal 2025 could hardly be described as "mediocre" because it was uncertain which customers would continue to buy its products. As soon as this news broke, the stock price of the chip giant, which has been favored by Wall Street this year, plummeted by 10%. ARM's stock price has risen 41% since the beginning of the year, and investors believe it will benefit from the explosive growth of AI.
In the coming era of AI PCs, "energy saving" is considered to be the most critical selling point of related devices. ARM also clearly wants to play a leading role in this process, driving the growth of Windows on ARM, and indeed the ARM architecture in the PC market.
In this context, Qualcomm alone is obviously unable to meet ARM's needs. Especially in the case that Qualcomm and ARM have been disliked because of the change in architecture authorization, it is even more necessary to introduce MediaTek as a catfish to avoid Qualcomm's dominance in the Windows on ARM track.