Who wants the skin of X86 processors? Everyone (Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm…)

The ball is rolling: Nvidia is showing its teeth in the PC processor market and is developing an ARM chip for Windows machines, according to an exclusive article from the Reuters agency. And bouncing back and conforming to news from SemiAccurate this summer, Reuters confirms that AMD is also jumping on the wagon. The two chip designers would prepare the first processors for 2025. A choice which is not insignificant, because at that time, the ARM version of Windows (Windows on ARM) until now exclusive to Qualcomm should be open to other chip designers. Suffice it to say that Intel’s ears must be getting hot… At least as much as its stock, which plummeted when the information was released, while its competitors were on the rise.

It must be said that the arrival of the king of GPUs and AI, whose stock market listing has exploded in recent years, is enough to shake the competition. While you shouldn’t sell the x86 bear skin before emulating it, you shouldn’t be surprised either. Because the AMD/Intel duopoly around x86 is in trouble. Here’s why the arrival of Nvidia and AMD in addition to Qualcomm makes sense. And probably good for the industry.

Microsoft does not want to depend on a single player

If Qualcomm launched and has persevered for more than six years in the design of ARM chips for Windows, it is because Microsoft asked it to do so. In addition to the vision of the increase in performance of ARM chips and their greater energy efficiency, it is also and above all the erosion of Apple’s market share since the launch of the M1 in 2020 which is undoubtedly at the origin of the acceleration of Microsoft’s plans.

Over the past seven years, the PC, server and supercomputer market has been dominated end-to-end by Intel, with market shares of 90% everywhere – including macOS. Intel which, after missing the mobile shift, stagnated in terms of the number of cores in favor of AMD, started well behind on the computing GPU in favor of Nvidia and stumbled in the reduction of engraving fineness while TSMC accelerated. Various errors which have harmed the world of PCs, in particular that of portable PCs which today suffer from certain delays compared to Apple machines, particularly in terms of endurance and performance/watt ratio.

Nvidia first under Windows RT (ARM)

If Qualcomm, which will announce its Snapdragon

In fact, we have to go back to October 2012 to see the first machines running with a special version of Windows 8 called Windows RT. A 32-bit OS, but more limited in functions and intended for ARM devices such as certain touchscreen tablets. An operating system which therefore began its career on Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 or Nvidia Tegra 3 chips, one of the ancestors of the Switch SoC. Microsoft will also choose Nvidia chips for its Surface RTs, in particular the Tegra 4, the latest generation of chips with the Snapdragon 800 before Microsoft puts an end to the RT adventure.

A fairly disappointing adventure both in terms of sales, performance and the software ecosystem. Microsoft failed to mobilize the software industry behind two generations of products that were rather slow compared to what Intel’s x86 chips offered – at the time. For its part, AMD had the K12 in its pipeline, an aborted ARM chip that it was considering as an alternative to emerge from the x86 shadows.

According to Reuters, Nvidia is therefore returning to the ARM chipset game for PCs. But the context is completely different. Nvidia is today much more of a simple seller of gaming GPUs, ARM has managed to enter into high-power computing, Qualcomm has been clearing the Windows field for years. And the example of Apple’s successful transition arouses desire.

AMD has already designed ARM chips Last 2022, father of Zen architecture at AMD and great semiconductor guru, the American Jim Keller, openly regretted that AMD had abandoned a processor which you may not have never heard of it: the K12. Based on the ARMv8-A instructions, a chip announced in 2016 which was to see the light of day in 2017 and which wanted to reshuffle the cards against x86 – AMD also had plans in the works for hybrid chips, which could optionally use cores x86 or ARM!

This chip that could have changed the course of history is not AMD’s first ARM chip. That title goes to the Opteron A1100, an already 64-bit processor based on eight Cortex-A57/link cores. A chip already highlighted, at the time, for its “exceptional performance per watt”. AMD will not go further in the adventure, undoubtedly because of a major pitfall in the world of servers and other data centers at the time: software compatibility.

This problem of software inheritance, Intel and AMD are taking advantage of it in the PC and server market. Holder of an x86 license – the result of a legal war which was settled amicably in 1995 – AMD is the only one able to hit Intel head-on. But he remains the eternal second behind the “master”, who has deeper pockets and has his industrial tools at his disposal.

ARM more competitive and less under control than x86

The x86 Intel/AMD duopoly is impossible to disrupt on this instruction set, because Intel does not provide licenses. Unlike ARM, which made its success on its neutrality in chip design. ARM designs and manages the ISA (i.e. the instruction set), develops more or less complete technological blocks (GPU, NPU, etc.) and offers its customers licenses ranging from the simple CPU core to the complete SoC through the right to do as the company sees fit – the architectural license from Fujitsu or Apple, who therefore control the nature of their CPU cores.

If Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm are in the race, a fourth thief could have a say from 2025: MediaTek. Once targeted by competition for the low power of its chips, the Taiwanese company has gained momentum in recent years, both in smartphones with the Dimensity 9000 and in other areas – it is the world leader in video decoding chips for TVs. In addition, it recently joined forces with Nvidia in a joint automotive platform project.

In addition, MediaTek is currently developing ARM chips for Chromebooks called Kompanio. And turns out to be, with Qualcomm, the only ARM player to have the entire range of telecommunications (Wi-Fi, modems, etc.), which can be an asset for improving its profitability. The last advantage of MediaTek being… Its nationality. As the leading players in the world of laptops, Asus and Acer, are also Taiwanese, cultural proximity could play a role in the event that MediaTek also decides to “go there”.

Decline of x86 in the face of software library and compatibility problems

With a death announced every six months for 15 years, the x86 instruction set is still alive and well at its 45 year old age. An age that it sometimes shows, certain instructions being present only to maintain compatibility with old programs. If a 100% 64-bit X86-S project exists, it has not yet seen the light of day. And at the moment, Intel and AMD are dragging around some old stuff in their chips.

But x86 has on its side the weight of history, decades of program compatibility and, we must not forget, the gaming advantage in its pocket. Faced with it, the more competitive, more responsive and perhaps more efficient world of ARM also has challenges to overcome. And the biggest one is compatibility. A problem which has two aspects: software library compatibility, on the one hand, since the publishers (and behind them the chip designers) will have to put the turbo on the compilation of programs in ARM64 to enrich the catalog. But also compatibility to be ensured between ARM chip vendors: will a program compiled for Windows on ARM on a Snapdragon chip work just as well on a future Nvidia or AMD chip?

And Microsoft in the story?

Here, once again, the shadow of Microsoft looms large. A giant certainly quick to carry out tests, but also very slow in certain actions – it took him a long time to compile Office in ARM64! Let’s hope for its partners that this time the Redmond giant really steps on the accelerator. As for Intel, we must not forget that the giant is reinventing itself. Its Meteor Lake chip is a total revolution in the way it composes chips. And from now on, the American no longer refrains from using TSMC engraving to improve its energy consumption. Will ARM find in Nvidia the partner to shake up Intel in one of its last challenges? If 2025 should be the moment of truth, elements of an answer could undoubtedly arrive as early as 2024…