TapTechNews reported on May 11 that Arm's CEO, Rene Haas, announced during the fiscal Q4 2024 earnings call that the Arm PC market is set to welcome new vendors. The quarter ended March 31 this year.
Haas stated:
'One of the steps necessary for the PC industry, especially the Windows on Arm (WoA) segment, is diversifying the vendor base. This will provide consumers with multiple units, SKUs, price points, and experiences.'
Everything I have heard indicates that in the next 12 to 36 months, multiple vendors will serve this market.
Currently, the WoA PC ecosystem primarily relies on Qualcomm processors, such as the Snapdragon X series, with no second processor manufacturer in the market; whereas in the broader Arm PC industry, aside from Apple, there are smaller chip suppliers like Rockchip, but these small businesses face limitations due to the lack of official Windows OS support.
Haas believes that with the diversification of processor suppliers, the WoA PC market will formally kickstart growth within the next 12 to 36 months. Thanks to their high performance and low power consumption, these processors will occupy a unique niche in fanless mobile devices powered by batteries.
Additionally, Haas and Arm CFO, Jason Child, confirmed during the call that the transition of the entire ecosystem from Arm v8 to v9 architecture has been quicker compared to the previous shift from v7 to v8; and that the royalty income derived from Arm's CSS (Computational Subsystem, a comprehensive bundle of pre-validated IP) model is almost twice that of the standard Arm v9 IP.