Not only might we see a rash of faster PCs running Arm chips and Windows, but we may also see Microsoft’s OS appear on M-series Macs. XDA-Developersisn’t clear about when the Qualcomm deal will expire, but things could get more interesting when it does. Most recently, Qualcomm announced plans to manufacture Apple M1-competitive silicon by 2023 with help from former Apple silicon team developers from Nuvia, which it acquired earlier this year. Apple devices sit at or near the top of most benchmark charts in each category and competitors in the same class now seem to be running at best one year behind.Īpple has blazed a trail - and as usual in time-honored fashion, competitors want to follow that path, too. Mac users upgrading to an M-series system seem thrilled with the performance and capability of these machines. Since then, the company’s decision to develop its own processors has paid dividends.

Where the industry is goingĪpple has been working with Arm to develop its chips since 2014, when it introduced the A4 processor inside iPhone 4.

But it’s a decision that will have far-reaching industry consequences, given we are the cusp of massive Arm adoption. We won’t know the conclusions of this investigation until 2022. (They are concerned the deal would give Nvidia too much power in the growing number of markets that rely on Arm reference designs.) This attempt is currently being investigated by the UK Competition & Markets Authority. One thing that might be in the way is Nvidia’s ongoing attempt to acquire Arm from Softbank. Microsoft has never given us much hope of this, and I think many industry watchers had begun to give up on the idea. But for many enterprises, the ability to run Windows in some way is an essential requirement, particularly for businesses still reliant on legacy systems for some tasks. Most Mac users - and Parallels - had been hoping Microsoft would simply offer up Windows for Arm licenses for sale, enabling businesses using multiple computing platforms to run Windows, iOS, and Mac apps on a single machine. Beyond that, other than using Windows 365, there has been no official, fully-supported way to run Windows on an M-series Mac - you don’t even get Boot Camp. All the same, we have known they can run Windows on Arm insider builds using virtualization tools such as Parallels. Why it mattersĪpple’s Mac sales continue to grow across most enterprise markets, but at present the M-series Macs have no official Windows support. Microsoft recently suggested an Arm version of Windows 11 for Apple Silicon is not “a supported scenario” – but things do change in tech. There is certainly a chance this won’t happen.

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