AMD and Nvidia to join Qualcomm in the Windows Arm(s) race
The x86 CPU architecture has dominated the PC market since dinosaurs roamed the land but there's been a flurry of rumours concerning efforts by AMD and Nvidia to battle Qualcomm head-on, preparing Arm-powered CPUs for Windows computers in 2025.
As things currently stand, Qualcomm has an exclusive deal with Microsoft, ensuring that any computer using Windows on Arm has a Snapdragon CPU inside it. This deal is set to end in a few year's time and given how the Arm architecture has dominated the phone industry and is making headway in the server and AI industries, it looks like AMD and Nvidia want to get the jump on Qualcomm.
That's according to a report by Reuters, which starts by saying that people with inside knowledge are claiming that Nvidia is planning to release an Arm CPU for Windows in 2025. This isn't new territory for the GPU giant, as it has been making such processors for years. The Nintendo Switch is powered by a version of Nvidia's Tegra X1 system-on-chip (SoC) that houses four Cortex-A57 CPU cores.
Nvidia and Microsoft have teamed up in the past, with the first two Surface tablets using Windows RT and Tegra SoCs in 2012 and 2013. Eventually, Microsoft went with Intel and its Atom CPU, and Nvidia then focused its processor designs for other markets.
More recently, Nvidia developed the Grace CPU, a design that's the polar opposite of the old Tegra. With 144 cores, based on Arm's Neoverse V2 architecture, it's targeted at the HPC (high performance computing) industry for use in data analytics and AI applications.
So definitely not suitable for a desktop PC, but Nvidia clearly has the financial backing to do something about that.
The report also says that AMD is developing an Arm CPU for Windows, too, and this is
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