In 2016, Microsoft granted exclusive rights to Qualcomm to develop and produce Arm chips for Windows. That deal is about to expire, and with a big bet on Arm-based laptops capable of running AI applications, other companies are developing their own chips.
According to an exclusive report by Reuters, which spoke to three sources familiar with the plans, Taiwanese chip design giant MediaTek will begin manufacturing its own Arm-based CPUs, expected to be released in 2025. MediaTek has a long history of to design and develop a wide range of system-on-chip solutions for various electronic devices, and it is therefore an obvious choice.
Instead of creating its own CPU architecture based on the Arm instruction set, the chip will reportedly use Arm's off-the-shelf design. This approach can significantly speed up development, Reuters explained.
Sources at Arm have said that one of their customers used the off-the-shelf components to build a chip in about nine months for a design that is already complete, which is not the case for MediaTek. For experienced chip design companies, advanced chips usually take significantly more than a year to build and test, depending on the complexity. Microsoft's latest move to use Arm designs is not surprising, as Apple has had great success using their own Arm-based chips for Mac computers.
However, the move towards Arm could threaten Intel's dominance in the PC market. Reuters previously reported that both Nvidia and AMD are developing Arm chips for Windows, and while this new Mediatek chip is separate from those efforts, the Taiwanese company is reportedly collaborating with Nvidia on their product, though details remain secret for now.
While it's possible that MediaTek's new chips will be used in the next generation of AI PCs, Reuters says it's "not immediately clear whether Microsoft has approved MediaTek's PC chip for the Copilot+ Windows program" . MediaTek and Microsoft have both declined to comment on the Reuters report