Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market

Nobody tell Intel about Apple Silicon! Or that Apple's sales are increasing while they rest of the industry is in a slump.

Apple's laptop segments have been decreasing massively since their switch to custom chips, actually. Could just be timing, or could be that people don't want the hassle.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/18/kuo-macbook-sales-down-amid-no-new-products/
- They swapped to M series chips, what, two years ago? This says sales this year are down due to no new Macs.
- Hassle?
- The M1 series was super good and Apple just hasn’t released anything since then worth upgrading to if you have an M1. They’re gaining market share though slowly, which indicates that their sales slump is lower than the market average.
- Be careful in trying to interpret year over year statistics. Last year was huge for Apple as if you look at Q3 2022 then Apple increased sales 10% while the rest of the PC market dropped a massive 18%.
  
  You're saying "since switching from x86 to ARM apples sales are down! see it was a bad idea!" but actually they have been way way up and are just finally getting inline with the sales decline the rest of the PC industry has had after the covid work from home rush ended.
Do you have numbers? Cause I'm thinking at at 8.6% worldwide, it's not really a big chunk of the pie. Especially as the article states, it's declining compared to the year before.
- The article you linked pretty much sums it up.
  
  Apple’s Mac market share increased to 8.6%, reporting year-over-year shipment growth of 10.3%, the only major manufacturer to do so.
  
  The year-over-year Mac shipment growth comes even as the broader market and competitors notch sharp declines in shipments, and as the Intel transition wraps up.
  
  Lenovo, HQ, Dell and Acer all had year-over-year drops in shipments, according to IDC data.
you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Apple's laptops sales are decreasing. And most Mac users can't tell the differences between Intel, the M chips, AMD or whatever. They just know that there's a pretty apple on the back of their laptop and that's why they buy it.
- Apple's laptops sales are decreasing.
  
  Right now. But that’s because the M1 and M2 Mac sold like hot cakes and we’re at a quiet stop in the product timeline. They pick right back up when the new models drop.
  
  And most Mac users can't tell the differences between Intel, the M chips, AMD or whatever.
  
  This is silly. The M1 models were leaps and bounds better than the Intel predecessors. That’s not all due to the ARM chip, but list a “MacBook Air 2020” for sale and watch the Mac heads stumble over each other to ask “intel or m1”.
  
  They just know that there's a pretty apple on the back of their laptop and that's why they buy it.
  
  People generally tend to stick to one ecosystem because of lock in effects, such as investment in apps etc, but that’s equally true in the windows world. I’m not sure I would classify Mac users on the whole as tech illiterate though. Most know exactly what they are getting and why.
  
  And they are also A LOT of Mac users that just want a decent Unix machine and sturdy, capable hardware.
- Some of those people know that docker performance is hot garbage on Macs.

Of course intel would be the last company to admit x86 is dying. It just doesn't make sense to keep doubling down on it anymore, Apple has proven ARM is more power efficient and in many cases more powerful than x86. I wanted to buy a new laptop this year but it makes no sense to do so considering Windows ARM machines are right around the corner and will triple battery life and increase performance.

Intel is a licensed ARM manufacturer. They’re just doing PR but are capable of playing both sides.
This seems to be doggedly persistent rumor. Apple's M chips are better due to better engineering and vertical integration.

There is no inherent benefit to the underlying isa
- Is it me or is this even worse news for Intel?
  
  The new guys have better engineering that the guys they have been doing it since the dawn of the semiconductor age.
  
  Pack it in.
- ARM has a more efficient instruction set, uses less power, and generates less heat while matching performance. Not really a rumor.
CPU aside, it's best to wait for thunderbolt 5 to mature. Might finally be able to go to using one device for travel and an eGPU for gaming.
- Did you have issues with tb and an egpu? Beside some minor issues, my laptop with tb3 and an egpu works actually good.
- I mean that's fine. I'm just saying that x86 chips are still faster. If you want a beefy laptop, especially a work device that only needs to be slightly portable eg drag it to conference rooms and back to your desk, there is little current reason to go with ARM. I'm not saying they won't catch up but folks in here seem to be thinking that ARM is currently faster.
What arm chips are faster than ryzen or Intel chips?
- M2 Max chips are close to the high end i9, but the M series cpus are mobile chips. They're designed for laptops. If competition is a bit harder then no doubt desktop-focused ARM CPUs will match their performance soon.

Intel is finally innovating because of increased pressure. Don't let the Pat Gelsinger's calm tone fool you, he knows exactly what the competition is bringing. Apple has proven what Linux users have known for a few years, the CPU architecture is not as directly tied to the software as it once was. It doesn't matter if it's x86, ARM, or RISC-V. As long as we have native builds (or a powerful compatibility layer) it's going to be business as usual.

the CPU architecture is not as directly tied to the software as it once was

Yeah it used to be that emulating anything all would be slow as balls. These days, as long as you have a native browser you're halfway there, then 90% of native software will emulate without the user noticing since it doesn't need much power at all, and you just need to entice stuff that really needs power (Photoshop etc), half of which is already ARM-ready since it supports Macs.

The big wrench in switching to ARM will be games. Game developers are very stubborn, see how all games stopped working on Mac when Apple dropped 32-bit support, even though no Macs have been 32-bit for a decade.
- The game support was pretty much crap even before then and a lot of the blame lies on Apple.

Even AMD showed just how power hungry and thermal inefficient intel generally is

As Arm develops more every year, laptop OEMs will eventually switch just because of the insane power and thermal benefit.

I hope RISC-V gets its chance to shine too

Current gen AMD laptop CPUs rival apple silicon in performance and power consumption on mobile. x86 is nowhere near as close to dying as people think.
- Aye exactly, Apple's marketing, which is often basically lying, has a lot to answer for in the prevelence of this idea. They'd have you believe that they're making chips with 14 billion percent more performance per watt and class beating performance. Whereas in reality they're very much going toe to toe with AMD and other high end ARM chip vendors
- Don't agree with this. I have the newest 7840U that's supposed to be THE answer to the M2. Performance per watt and battery life is way worse.
No laptop manufacturers would switch to arm until a good x86 compatibility comes along. People would make huge fuss if they can't use their favorite apps or if those apps don't run decently
- There's already CPUs with extra instructions specifically designed for efficient emulation of other instruction sets. This includes ARM CPUs with x86 emulation at near native speed.
- Chromebook eco system might have a word with you.
- * laughs in M1 *
RISCV is going to be huge, but it will take at least another decade for performance version to catch up with Intel and ARM. Hopefully by that time we know how to deal with architecture changes in consumer gear because of the ARM switch and can just painlessly move over.
My fear is losing what we have x86 PCs in the standardization of the platform. ARM and even more RISC-V, is a messy sea of bespokeness. I want hardware to be auto-discoverable so a generic OS can be installed.

Let’s file this in the cabinet of company quotes that come back to haunt them

Blockbuster also didn't think Netflix would make a dent in the entertainment industry. Guess where they are now? 😂
- If the entertainment industry was a car, Netflix is a truck that keeps backing up and repeatedly t-boning the door of quality.
  
  It made more than a dent.

Intel is doing all the things dying companies do.

I hope I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.

Under previous non-technical CEOs Intel lost it's focus on innovation leadership and became a commodity supplier, losing ground to AMD and NVIDIA. Pat Gelsinger is different, he's an engineer, he led the 486 program, he is committed to regaining technical leadership and compete with TSMC as a foundry player. The Intel 4 node is now in mass production, Intel 3, 20A and 18A will follow in the next 2 years. New foundry capacity is being added in every factory, and new sites are being developed, 10's of billions of investment, None-core business units are being divested. 15th generation processors with be AI native, the plan is that in the same way as Centrino kick started WiFi, AI support on the desktop will be a game changer.

Are these things that dying companies do?
- Spend money they don’t have in a last ditch attempt to hit the right buzz words and turn things around for real this time? Yes. That’s exactly what they do.
  
  But then again, so do companies that have just hit a minor slump.
  
  Let’s hope they manage to fix things. I don’t like TSMCs monopoly position right now.

Underestimating the competition is often a path to failure

Will Intel exist in 2026? NVIDIA and AMD are making ARM chips for 2025, China is investing heavily in RISC-V, and AMD already released a CPU that rivals Apple's M2 which is x86. Who knows how things will turn out once they release an ARM chip.

Things are shaping up to become an NVIDIA vs AMD arms race with some Chinese company becoming a dark horse and announcing a RISC-V chip in 2-3 years.

There was a company that announced a major technological advancement in chip fabrication in the US, but I can't remember who or what it was. My maggot brain thinks something with light-based chips or something? I dunno... that might also be something to look out for

Edit: it was intel: Intel Demos 8-Core, 528-Thread PIUMA Chip with 1 TB/s Silicon Photonics

It will take at least another 10 years to get a majority of the market off of x86 with the 20+ years of legacy software bound to it. Not to mention all of the current gen x86 CPUs that will still be usable 10 years from now.
- Honestly, we just need some sort of compatibility layer. Direct porting isn't completely required yet.
- You don't really need the majority of the market to have moved before things start to get tricky for Intel. They're a very much non-diversified company; the entire house is bet on x86. They've only just started dabbling in discrete GPUs, despite having made integrated GPU SOCs for years. Other than a bit of contract fabbing, almost every penny they make is from x86.
  
  If ARM starts to make inroads into the laptop/desktop space and RISC-V starts to take a chunk of the server market, the bottom could fall out of Intel's business model fast.
- I'm not sure about that. If for example the EU says "for the environment, you may not use chips that use X watts/Ghz" or something, x86 might be out of the game pretty quickly. Also, becoming market leader doesn't mean old hardware, it's the new hardware. I bet by 2030, the majority of chipsets sold will be either ARM or RISC-V. AMD did make an ARM rival with the 7840U, but with their entry in to ARM in 2025, it's not preposterous to believe the ARM ecosystem will pick up steam.
  
  Also, recompiling opensource stuff for ARM is probably not going to be a huge issue. clang and gcc already support ARM as a compilation target, and unless there's x86 specific code in python or ruby interpreters, UI frameworks like Qt and GTK, they should be able to be compiled without much issue. If proprietary code can't keep up or won't keep up, the most likely outcome will be x86 emulators or the dumping of money into QEMU or stuff like Rosetta for windows.
  
  Anyway, I'm talking out of my ass here as I don't write C/C++ and don't have to deal with cross-compilation, nor do I have any experience in hardware. It's all just a feeling.
- I think it's safe to say Apple has proved that wrong three times.
  When they switched from Motorola to Power, then from Power to Intel, and latest from Intel to Arm.
  If necessary software will be quickly modified, or it will run well enough on compatibility layers.
  
  The switch can happen very fast for new hardware. The old systems may stay around for a while, but the previous CPU architecture can be fazed out very quickly in new systems. Apple has proven that.
i think its neet how geopolitically this is all connected to the taiwan issue and only when the mainland can make chips as good as NvDia in taiwain will they be able to economically handle the invasion

if they invade today gpus and cpus prices explode into dumbdum levels for a few years bro it wouod suck for the whole world

Posturing. It's already obvious that Arm is kicking ass. It may not take over, but it's more than made a dent.

And if it won't be ARM, it might be RISC-V
- I could see ARM moving into the laptop market and RISC-V taking over the embedded and low end of the phone market.

A brief history lesson relating to Intel and ARM.... Intel made ARM processors. They were not great. Of course, this was many many years ago, but even compared to others of the same from the same generation and year range, they were kind of poo.

The product was Intel Xscale. Manufactured starting in 2002, and only lasted about 3-4 years before being dropped. Right before there was a big smartphone boom. The processors found their way into the smartphone predecessor, the PDA. Notably, I purchased one device with this type of processor right before the whole thing collapsed.... A Dell Axiom x51v. It ran Windows Mobile, which later turned into Microsoft's attempt to compete with the likes of Google and Apple in the smartphone space, and it's obvious how that worked out for them.

Intel is saying this because they have to believe it's true. They've abandoned all ARM development and seem to have no intention of picking it up again. They failed in the ARM space, creating fairly poor versions of the chips that they did produce, and they seem to have no intention of repeating that failure.

Mark my words, Intel will likely go all in on RISC-V if anything. They'll continue to build x86, they have way too much invested in that space and it's one of few that they've actually had significant success in, but when it comes to mobile/RISC, ARM isn't something that they will be picking up again.

So bluntly, this is true... For Intel. They must believe it because they have given themselves no alternative.

As a owner of an ARM laptop: wtf are they smoking?

ARM just makes sense for portable devices for obvious reasons, x86 isn't dying though. For the average person who needs a laptop to do some professional-managerial work ARM is perfect.

What are those reasons that you think are so obvious? I have no idea what you could be referring to 😅
- ARM is more efficient and as a "system on chip" reduces the need for as many other components on the boards, phones for example. Unless you're doing heavy cpu or gpu intensive tasks there's a bunch of upsides and no downsides to ARM.
- Arm tends to be a lot more power efficient, so you can get better battery life on portable devices.
There is also a sizable market for laptops that do not do much more than log onto a remote desktop. Especially with remote working, that has becomes the perfect middle ground between security, cost, and ease of use. A cheap ARM processor would work perfectly for those machines.
- I'm a sysadmin and would much rather have a light arm machine to remote in from than a standard Intel laptop.

They already have with Apple M1 Macs

The M series from Apple has singlehandedly convinced me ARM is the future. The battery life we get with the performance they provide is insane.

whatever the new architecture ends up being, at some point we will see x86 relegated to a daughter board in the machine while we transition, or x86 will live in a datacenter and you'll buy time on a "cloud pc" like what microsoft will already sell you in azure

I've been saying that MS is likely trying to ditch the NT kernel for a while now. But I forgot about them azure cloud desktop. I can see them rolling out a Chromebook like environment (Linux based) that would hook into a cloud azure full desktop instance. That way, their Surface devices (for example) could be used for basic web browsing stuff on its own, then you could connect to your desktop for everything else.

Ah yes, the “the weather is clear now” argument for not putting up an umbrella because you fear you’re going to get wet if you’re wrong is peak copium.

See how well that worked for Sears, Blockbuster, Dial-Up providers, TV… etc.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger doesn't seem worried about it yet, as he said on the company's most recent earnings call (via Seeking Alpha).

"Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally, they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business," said Gelsinger.

Ideally, Arm-based PCs promise performance on par with x86 chips from Intel and AMD, but with dramatically better power efficiency that allows for long-lasting battery life and fanless PC designs.

Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon chip for PCs, the 8cx Gen 3 (also called the Microsoft SQ3), appears in two consumer Windows devices.

Even if Gelsinger is wrong, he's trying to spin the rise of Arm PCs as a potentially positive thing, saying that Intel would be happy to manufacture these chips for its competitors.

Right now, TSMC has an effective monopoly on cutting-edge chip manufacturing, making high-end silicon for Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and (tellingly) Intel itself.

The original article contains 521 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

1 - laptops usually ship windows out of the box 2 - windows ARM has some trouble due to partnerships 3 - not all apps will have equal parity between older arch to ARMs

Changes are bound to happen. They don’t want to pay for the ARMs fees probably. And if they don’t bring something at Apple Silicon level, it would be an issue to intel: Intel giant producer of CPUs Apple new to laptop/desktop grade cpu designs Kinda shameful

People are going to start to wonder what they have all the Windows OS for when all they do is run a browser. If someone makes a less hassle Linux distro...that runs well on Arm... Well we could finally have some advancement in mobile computing. ChromeOS was almost it but Google made it all cloud and Google only.
- If you say browser only, then you are relegating to the cloud, no? Is then Google not doing things right?
Windows for Arm is surprisingly useful, and especially the x86 emulation works pretty well - for what I've been doing so far more seamless than the emulation on MacOS. The bigger problem is that the tooling for utilizing it in a corporate environment is still pretty much missing. You can't get release images from Microsoft, you either go via insider builds, or download release builds via 3rd party sites which index and extract Microsofts artifacts - both not really acceptable. Additionally the tools for customising installations and creating unattended images don't work for Arm yet.

On top of that there's not much hardware available, and it tends to be overpriced. I got a bunch of HP notebooks quite cheaply, and recently was looking into getting one Thinkpad as they have a 32GB option (HP has 8 and 16, and 16 is not enough for serious use nowadays). Seems the 32GB option is not available in EU at all, and while they're running a sale in the US which makes a 32GB available for a decent price there here in the EU I'd pay significantly more for a lower spec variant.

Non x86 has been tried at least twice before on windows and failed. While this is certainly the best attempt yet, there is no guarantee of success. Sure would be nice however to get more competition.

The main difference is that Alpha and Itanium came from the high end, where they struggled with low quantities, horrible yields and poor economies of scale.

ARM comes in from the low end, and suddenly the shoe is the other foot. There are more ARM processors in use right now than the number of x86 processors that were ever made in the entire history of computing. They are cheap, they are power efficient, they are everything the market screams for.

The writing is on the wall if Intel doesn’t get its ass in gear and gets substantially better very quickly. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but best case they will remain the king of a shrinking, increasingly irrelevant market until they are acquired.
- I was referring to arm and other risc cpus Microsoft has tried before. This is Microsoft's 3rd attempt with arm. The NT in Windows NT literally is a reference to a RISC chip.

reminds me of "In the world, there is space for 5 computers" or something along those lines

ARM is dead. Anecdotally, apple has the longest history of any company hitching to dead architectures (6502, 68k. Power PC, etc.). The only architecture that apple has hitched to that didn't totally die is x86, and x86 will die soon to RISC-V. Why would anyone pay royalties to be controlled by ARM when an open alternative exists. RISC-V is the new future that all the old guard are trying their best to delay as long as possible. ARM was sold by the original owners the second RISC-V overcame its major legal hurdles. The new owners are trying to pump as much as possible to minimize their losses in the public stock exchange. Anyone with an ounce of sense can look at the timeline of RISC-V and the sale of ARM to see the real picture without fanboi nonsense.

RISC-V is still not going to take over x86 for quite a while. As much as I'd love for it to, it's still going to take some work.

Give it about 8-10 years and I think that's when x86 is going to be out the window, and will be an architecture delegated solely for enthusiasts.
- I agree it will take awhile to completely take over even the low end market, but like there is already a data center running on RISC-V that was in the news cycle a month or two back. Intel has been putting a lot of money into it too because they know the change is coming. We are on the edge of a major shift needed for AI anyways. I think that will be the death knell for x86. The memory and cache bus structures need to change to accommodate tensor math much more efficiently. Why restructure the dying x86 so substantially when it could be done in RISC-V and make most hardware antiquated at the same time to finance the bleeding edge shift. I think The big players will still be on top, except ARM will fade into irrelevance like MIPS. Proprietary/planned obsolescence/exploitation in the digital landscape is a major problem that needs to go away. All the relevant companies have access to reverse engineered hardware from their competitors. Proprietary only exists to exploit end users. RISC-V is a small step in the right direction of restoring the right to fundamental ownership.
- Id say more like 20-40 years. x86 won't die that easily
RISC-V is about 5-10yrs behind the performance of ARM. If ARM continues to improve it may never catch up.
- I agree on the time line.
  
  RISCV has to completely slaughter ARM in the uC and SBC arenas before it can be a serious contender for the desktop market.
  
  Basically, RISCV’s selling point is that it’s royalty free. Anyone can implement it without paying anything to anyone, no NDA’s nothing. In the uC market, where chips cost a fraction of a dollar in quantity and margins are practically non existent, not paying the ARM tax makes a HUGE difference.
  
  Once they take over the uC market, it can move up, leveraging the experience the experience of being the world most popular core into more beefy SoCs. This is your raspberry pi equivalents and your budget phones.
  
  From there, you can add performance features and move up to tablets, flagship phones and low power laptops. And then, eventually, performance laptops, desktop machines and servers.
  
  This will take at least a decade.
- This is not how ISA, fab nodes, or hardware design work at all. ARM is not special. It was just a company that made it easier to put together a bunch of processor blocks and peripherals for a fee and royalty. It was just a convince thing for the trailing edge. Everything ARM can do RISC-V can do as far as ISA. No one is going to pay a royalty when the same thing is free. This is the realm of big money where the choice is obvious. Not to mention, we are on the final node already when it comes to scaling, the progress of the last 40 years has stopped. There is potential in new technologies like computing with light, but silicon lithography will never drop below 3-5 nanometers because that is the end of what physics allows with quantum tunneling effects. We will eventually move past the stone age of computing with silicon. Organic technology is the holy grail, but until a major shift is made, we are at the end of silicon progress despite what all the marketing fools hype and moan about. ARM has no where to go. The people that created it bailed ages ago because the writing was on the wall all the way back then.