Arm-based processors will account for 30% of the PC market by 2026
Analysts at Canalys, a market analysis company, believe that Arm-based processors will capture a considerable share of the PC market and half of the cloud server market in just four years, given that Arm’s architecture is progressing so rapidly. The rapid transition of Apple’s M-series processors to PC systems shows that the Arm architecture has great potential in the market. DigiTimes reported that Steve Brazier, CEO, and president of Canalys, said that by 2026, half of the cloud processors will be based on ARM architecture, and 30% of PC processors will be based on ARM architecture. It was an extraordinary event, and an industry-changing one, that just wasn’t getting enough attention.
At present, personal computers based on the Arm architecture have gained a considerable piece of the PC market. According to reports, almost 100% of the personal computers currently on sale by Apple, such as iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, are MacOS systems equipped with Arm-based M-series processors. By the third quarter of 2022, Apple has accounted for 13.5%. PC market. Moreover, despite the global economic downturn and reduced public demand, Apple still created a sales performance from 7.174 million MAC units in the third quarter of 2021 to 10.06 million units in the third quarter of 2022. In addition, Chromebooks are also equipped with Arm architecture processors. Although they are not as famous as Apple’s Mac computers, they are still a powerful product under the Arm architecture. The sales of the two may account for at least 15% of PC sales in the third quarter of 2022.
In terms of cloud servers, thanks to Ampere, AWS, and Huawei’s data center-level SOCs, servers have recently become another frontier where the Arm architecture can enter. According to Omdia, Arm processors account for approximately 7.1% of the Q2 server market in 2022.
However, not all companies need Arm servers. For example, enterprises that have deployed tens of thousands of servers are unlikely to adopt Arm, because they run applications developed based on x86, and the advantages of Arm are not obvious.
Brazier believes that Arm still has advantages in the cloud server market. Cloud servers are the main market to be addressed first by systems based on Arm processors. In the future, this architecture will be used by 50% of cloud server SOCs.
