ARM CEO Believes Qualcomm’s Exclusivity Agreement With Microsoft’s ‘Windows on ARM’ Platform Will End This Year

12.01.2024 - 12:57 / wccftech.com / Dell / Will

Qualcomm was reportedly able to leverage an exclusive agreement with Microsoft where only the San Diego company’s chipsets would be used with any OEM launching a Windows notebook. However, we could be heading into a new era as, according to ARM CEO, the agreement between the two companies will expire later this year, giving other chipset makers an opportunity to penetrate this market and offer more options to customers.

Rene Haas, ARM’s chief executive, recently sat down with Stratechery to discuss a wide range of topics, including touching on an exclusive agreement between Qualcomm and Microsoft. For several years, the ‘Windows on ARM’ platform allowed various laptop makers such as HP, Lenovo, and Dell to ship notebooks with ARM chipsets, but those particular models only featured a Qualcomm SoC. This was thanks to the latter forming an exclusive partnership with Microsoft.

Now, Haas believes that the days of this exclusive agreement are numbered, and with it expiring later this year, it will open a ton of opportunities for other players to enter the market and take that market share away from Qualcomm.

“Yeah, that makes sense. Microsoft and Windows were on, I think, exclusively with Qualcomm for Arm for a very long time. Now, there’s news about Nvidia or an AMD making Arm chips for Windows. Not an Arm announcement, but is that really an Arm announcement? Is this more symbolic of Arm as a dual licensing model? It has royalties on chips and also has licensing, is this emblematic of a shift to licensing being more important and you providing these systems and subsystems and other companies can brand them? Am I applying the right thinking to sort of the wrong area?

RH : Yeah, maybe not quite so much. I think the way to think about Windows expansion and, yeah, I think it’s really well-documented that the exclusivity that Qualcomm has with Windows times out, I think, this year. I think it’s this year.”

While Qualcomm prepares its Snapdragon X Elite for various notebook computers, we reported in late 2023 that ARM-based chipsets could be launched by NVIDIA and AMD, with the possibility that MediaTek could also enter the same market. Analysts have already praised MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300, and though it caters to smartphones, the Taiwanese fabless semiconductor possesses the experience and resources to take on Qualcomm in a different category.

For now, Qualcomm likely has the upper hand with its Snapdragon X Elite, with an earlier multi-core comparison revealing that the laptop SoC is 21 percent faster than Apple’s latest M3. We may find out how long before other players enter with their offerings in late 2024 or early 2025, so stay tuned for more updates.

News Source: Stratechery