According to a
DigiTimes research report, the market share of notebooks based on ARM architecture will continue to increase in the next few years. In 2020, the market share of notebooks based on the ARM architecture is only 1.4%, and it will increase to 12.7% in 2022. The report predicts that by 2023, the market share of notebooks based on ARM architecture will reach 13.9%.
In absolute terms, the market share of notebooks based on ARM architecture is still far behind the traditional X86 architecture. But in terms of growth rate, from 2020 to 2022, the market share of notebooks based on ARM architecture has increased nearly 9 times. Such a terrifying growth multiple is certainly due to the fact that the previous market share was too small, but there are two reasons that cannot be ignored.
First, in 2020, Apple released its self-developed desktop-level ARM chip M1, and also released three products equipped with this chip, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, and Mac Mini. This is easily reminiscent of Apple’s switch from Motorola processors to IBM’s Power PC processors in 1994 and from Power PC processors to Intel processors in 2006. Once the three products were released, everyone was very curious, and everyone was speculating about the performance of the new chips. The M1 version of the MacBook takes full advantage of the low power consumption and long battery life of the ARM chip. Compared with the Intel version, the noise and battery life are significantly improved. At the same time, thanks to Apple’s addition of a dedicated multimedia processing unit to the M1, users can get significant performance improvements when using specifically optimized software.
It has been two years since the release of the M1, and the M2 was also released in June of this year. Compared with the M1 when it was first released, much software needed to be translated by Rosetta, and now the adaptation of the original ARM version has been completed. Under Apple’s strategy of combining software and hardware, the ARM version of the MacBook has become able to meet the needs of more and more people, which is conducive to increasing the market share of ARM-based notebooks.
Second, with the in-depth cooperation between Qualcomm and Microsoft, many manufacturers, including Lenovo, Huawei, etc., have launched Windows On Arm notebooks. Qualcomm developed the 8cx series of chips specifically for Windows. The latest generation is 8cx Gen3. Compared with the second generation, the CPU performance is increased by 85%, the GPU performance is increased by 60%, and the single-threaded performance is increased by 40%. At the same time, Microsoft has completed the Windows On Arm support for the 64-bit program running. Previously, the ARM version of Windows only supported translation and running 32-bit, which caused much software to fail to run. The ARM version of Windows notebooks can already meet the needs of daily light office work, and at the same time, compared with x64 architecture notebooks, it also has advantages in terms of battery life.
