Arm up nearly 7%. Nvidia up 5%. Microsoft up 2%. Intel down over 3%. It’s not hard to spot the winners and losers from yesterday’s reportage of Nvidia preparing to (re)enter the desktop CPU market, using Arm’s architecture rather than Intel’s platform.
First Reuters and then Bloomberg reported that both Nvidia and AMD—Intel’s traditional rival in CPUs, and Nvidia’s in GPUs—were quietly working on Arm-based desktop CPUs. While Nvidia’s stock rose on the reports, AMD’s slipped by more than 1%, perhaps indicating investor nervousness at the prospect of facing down $1-trillion Nvidia in yet another market. (AMD is trying to loosen Nvidia’s firm grasp on the high-end AI chip market, and as always there are those GPUs.)
Nvidia has experience in this space, albeit quite a while back—its Tegra 3 system on a chip powered Microsoft’s first Surface tablet, which was a flop, over a decade ago. These days it also has a data center CPU called Grace, which it describes as a “superchip.” That’s definitely at the other end of the price and performance spectrum from the sort of desktop CPUs being talked about now.
At the moment, only two companies make Arm-based desktop CPUs. One of them is Apple, whose M-series of in-house processors has been crushing it in desktops, laptops, and tablets—having come of age in the mobile context, Arm’s architecture offers much better power efficiency than Intel’s offerings. But the only one addressing the Windows market is Qualcomm, which has been working with Microsoft on Windows-on-Arm since 2016.
XDA-Developers reported a couple years back that Qualcomm actually had an exclusivity deal with Microsoft, and it was likely to expire “soon.” The termination date now seems to be 2024, with both Nvidia and AMD’s Arm-based desktop CPUs reportedly set to hit the market the following year.
Intel’s been betting on the integration of AI capabilities into its upcoming CPUs as the way to pull itself out of the doldrums. Microsoft is also keen on those capabilities, which will in the future probably power much of the functionality of the Copilot AI assistant that’s being integrated into its operating system.
But it now looks like Windows fans will have many other options if, in a couple years, they want something with AI in it that can get closer to the efficiency of a MacBook. And what’s more, Nvidia and AMD both really know how to integrate a CPU with a GPU—Qualcomm’s graphics drivers reportedly have compatibility issues—and both know their way around AI.
The desktop market continues to get interesting again. More news below.
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David Meyer
