Earlier this year, we heard rumours of Windows 12 being in the works, and may be out of the pipelines as soon as next year. Lining up with this somewhat is the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset, which is expected to be out in the middle of next year. But put the two together, and we may be getting new PCs with Arm chips within that time frame.
Windows Central reports that Microsoft is working on a new Windows platform, codenamed Germanium, which is currently scheduled to hit its released to manufacturing (RTM) milestone in April. The report also notes that “OEMs will begin shipping new Arm hardware with Germanium preloaded as soon as June 2024”, citing the dependence of the Snapdragon X Elite on the new platform. Which sounds like Arm support for Windows will be happening around this time frame.
That’s not to say that there hasn’t been work done before to get Windows running on Arm. But as as PC Gamer points out, Windows 10 for Arm as it is currently “included emulation tech” which led to a number of limitations, with Windows 11 improving upon this. This may change next year, when Windows on the Germanium platform rolls around.
That being said, Windows Central casts doubt on whether the new Microsoft operating system version coming shortly after Germanium will indeed be called Windows 12. The report notes that the company is “wary of further fragmenting” its user base. Which is fair, considering it’s only been two years since Windows 11 became a thing.
It’s also worth noting that Qualcomm also has an exclusive licensing deal for providing Arm hardware to Windows devices that use it. Because of this, it makes some degree of sense as to why the company is the first in line to push out Arm chipsets for PCs. That being said, it won’t be the only one; not for long, at least. Both Nvidia and AMD are also already putting the work in, with something the average consumer can buy coming as soon as 2025.
For awhile, it was thought that the nature of the Arm architecture would only work for use cases where efficiency was preferred, and at the cost of sheer performance. Then Apple rolled out its M series of chips for its own products, starting with the M1. Should the stars align for both the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and the next Windows platform, we may be able to see if Arm can truly work on high performance machines outside of the Apple ecosystem with its very tiny range of hardware variation.
(Source: Windows Central, PC Gamer)
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