Taiwanese chip design giant MediaTek is developing an Arm-based personal computer chip that will work with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Last month, Microsoft unveiled a new generation of laptops with chips designed with Arm Holdings technology that deliver enough power to run the artificial intelligence applications that executives see as the future of computing General public. The MediaTek chip is intended for this effort.
The software company’s plans target Apple, which has been marketing its own Arm chips for Mac computers for about four years. Microsoft’s decision to optimize Windows for Arm could threaten Intel’s long-standing dominance in the PC market.
MediaTek and Microsoft declined to comment.
MediaTek’s PC chip is expected to launch late next year, after Qualcomm’s exclusive deal to supply chips for laptops expires, two of the people said. The chip is based on Arm’s off-the-shelf designs, allowing development to be significantly accelerated as less design work is required using off-the-shelf and tested chip components.
It was not immediately clear whether Microsoft had approved MediaTek’s PC chip for the Copilot+ Windows program.
Arm executives said one of its customers used the off-the-shelf components to build a chip in about nine months for a previously completed design, unlike MediaTek’s. For companies experienced in chip design, building and testing advanced chips typically takes much longer than a year, depending on their complexity.
In 2016, Microsoft asked Qualcomm to spearhead the migration of the Windows operating system to the underlying Arms processor architecture, which has long powered smartphones and their small batteries. Microsoft has granted Qualcomm an exclusivity deal to develop Windows-compatible chips based on the Arm architecture until 2024, Reuters reported last year.
As Qualcomm’s exclusivity deal with Microsoft expires, other designers have opted to make chips to contribute to Microsoft’s latest push for the use of Arm designs. For decades, Windows machines have relied on chip architecture made by Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
Nvidia and AMD are working on Arm designs for Windows machines, Reuters reported last year. Nvidia’s PC chip efforts are getting help from MediaTek, according to a person familiar with the matter. MediaTek’s PC chip efforts are separate from its collaboration with Nvidia, two of these people said. (Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Kenneth Li and Josie Kao)
