Windows PCs are shifting to ARM - what will it mean for you?

Datacom AD Strategy & Innovation Greg Furlong

Datacom's Associate Director of Strategy & Innovation Greg Furlong explains the shift to ARM architecture for PCs – why things are changing and what it means for Windows users. 

When we think of the humble PC, we tend to overlook — or not care — about the underlying architecture. Since the explosion of the PC in the business world, introduced by IBM in the early 1980s, not a lot has changed at a very base level. But it is all changing now. 

For the last 40 years, the IBM-compatible PC, which we now refer to as the Windows PC, has had the same base architecture: x86. Yes, the capabilities have changed, technology has progressed, and the operating systems have gone from DOS to OS/2, and to Windows. For most people in our industry, they have only ever experienced Windows running on Intel or AMD x86 silicon. The smartphone and tablet era has exploded, and the Apple Mac has found it’s corner of the market. To those that haven’t been watching, there has also been something happening at a silicon level across all these devices. Smartphones, tablets, and indeed, now the Mac, have all started with, or have migrated to, an architecture that many people may have never heard of before: ARM or Advanced RISC Machine. This is a technology that differs from x86 in the way it operates. For the purists, x86, championed by Intel, is based on CISC computing (Complex Instruction Set Computing). ARM is based on RISC computing (Reduced Instruction Set Computing). When the first PCs were designed and produced, this didn’t really matter. As we now push the limits of silicon manufacturing, energy consumption, and heat dissipation, this has now reached a tipping point.  

Now that phones, tablets and indeed Apple Macs have all landed on ARM architecture (M-series chipsets), it’s time for the humble PC to make the move. This is a bigger deal than it looks on the surface and has profound ramifications for the industry. Everyone is affected. Silicon designers and manufacturers, operating system designers, PC manufacturers, application developers, IT administrators, managed service providers, resellers and the IT channel in general. Over the next few years, industry experts predict that 25% to 50% of all PCs shipped will use ARM processors instead of x86 processors.

Microsoft have long wanted to move Windows to an ARM-based world. Windows on ARM with Windows 11 is not Microsoft’s first attempt but it is generally agreed by commentators that it is successful and ready for primetime. Sure, there are detractors, FUD and the odd misstep, but ARM is now working in the Windows PC marketplace, although it is very early days. 

To make Windows be successful on ARM, Microsoft also had the well-known Office application stack recoded to run natively on ARM in Windows 11. In addition, all the major browsers now support ARM natively. The most-used Adobe applications have also been ported. The most important part? The end user with their new Snapdragon PC doesn’t have to worry about this. When downloading from the Microsoft App store, if an ARM native application is available, that is downloaded instead of the x86 version. There are websites that now keep a running list of popular applications that have been ported to ARM, and this list grows. For most users, Microsoft 365 apps, and their favourite browser are the main ones, and for applications that haven’t been ported, the Prism emulator steps in and does on-the-fly translation, although this is invisible to users, and indeed IT departments. 

The Snapdragon X processor family is derived from a strategic acquisition made by Qualcomm in 2021. In 2019, a chip design company called Nuvia was formed by three former engineers and chip specialists who had worked at Apple on the A-series chip featured in iPhones and iPads. Two years later, Qualcomm snapped them up for $US1.4 billion. The resulting Snapdragon X designs were what was needed to power the next generation of devices running Windows, and Prism emulator, to enable the transition to begin with an experience that was seamless to the user.

At Datacom, we are here to assist our customers in understanding the transition. Managing these modern devices, provisioning applications, legacy compatibility and more, are some of the issues that we can assist and advise on, and how to successfully navigate this changing landscape. The other integral piece that is intrinsically linked, is AI-at-the-edge. All Snapdragon X processors are SoCs, in that they contain a traditional CPU (central processing unit), but also have a GPU (graphics processing unit), and now an NPU (neural processing unit) for on-chip local AI-processing. The ability for Microsoft 365 applications, Copilot, Adobe applications, and indeed any AI-aware application to offload tasks locally to an NPU rather than send the workload to the cloud has many benefits: Security, latency and lower power consumption. In fact, this new category of devices can deliver on real-world, all-day battery life and ‘instant on’, just like our phones. We shouldn’t be too surprised by this, as our phones run on ARM technology also – so we’re already using the tech. 

As the PC industry shifts to ARM-based devices, the promise of the next generation of PCs starts to become a reality: a PC that behaves more like a phone, while running Windows, is what we can look forward to. Devices that are thin, light, fan-less and can run all day will become the norm. Coupled with high-performance local AI and GPUs will lead to more applications being AI-aware at the edge, and enable performance computing at a lower cost, in a smaller form-factor. 

We’ve all become heavily reliant on the humble PC over the last few decades, so it’s exciting to think this critical tool is undergoing a change that will ultimately make it faster and easier to use. 

Need help? Get in touch with your key contact at Datacom if you’d like help navigating this significant change in the world of PCs or if you want to understand the specifics of how the change will impact you and your team. You can also email me and I’ll connect you with someone in the team.