Watch out Intel and AMD, more Arm chips are coming to the PC

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip is one of the more intriguing prospects for the PC over the next 12 months. Now Arm's head honcho has revealed that there will be more PC-optimised CPUs incoming over the next few years.

One immediately intriguing option for a new entrant into the Arm CPU for PC market could be Nvidia. But hold that thought, we'll come back to it.

Speaking to investors (via the Register), Arm CEO Rene Haas predicted that further players will follow in Qualcomm's footsteps in offering Arm-based chips expressly designed for the PC. 

«Everything I'm hearing says that there are going to be multiple suppliers to serve that market over the next 12 to 36 months,» Haas reckons. Anyone wanting to make such a chip must have a licensing arrangement with Arm, putting Haas in a good position to gauge where the industry is going. Unfortunately, Haas doesn't provide any insight into the the identities of these new players in Arm chips for PCs. 

Still, the net result, according to Haas, is that Arm chips will make significant inroads into the PC market. «We think now will be the time, over the next two, three years, where the Arm ecosystem will take a significant level of market share, primarily because of the level of experience that we've seen in the other ecosystem, the fantastic performance, the great battery life, the fact that you can build a high-performance machine minus a fan,» Haas says.

He certainly has a point about battery life and efficiency. Arm chips do tend to have clear advantages over traditional x86 CPUs in those areas.

However, software support has been the main stumbling block thus far in transitioning the PC over from x86 to Arm. As recently as the third quarter of last year, Arm chips accounted for just 1% of the PC market.

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It remains to be seen if this purported new, er, army of Arm chips can actually make a dent in the PC market. Qualcomm