Arm-Based Laptops Gaining Share Despite PC Market Weakness: Report

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Arm SoCs continue to eat at x86's share in mobile PCs.

MacBook Pro 14 and 16
(Image credit: Apple)

Although unit shipments of PCs decreased by around 15% in 2022 compared to the prior year and are expected to drop further in 2023, sales of Arm-based notebooks increased last year and will increase again this year, reports Counterpoint Research. Apple dominated the Arm-based laptop market last year with a 90% share, but as MediaTek and Qualcomm introduce their latest Arm system-on-chips for Windows PCs, such processors will gain even more share and will be in 25% of notebooks by 2027, the report says. 

Counterpoint Research predicts that Arm-powered laptops will "show a comparatively resilient demand throughout the coming quarters" due to success of Apple's MacBooks, a vanishing performance gap with x86 CPUs and strong ecosystem support. Indeed, while the whole PC market contracted by 28.1% in Q4 2022 compared to the same quarter a year before, unit shipments of Apple's PCs declined by 2.1%, according to IDC. Meanwhile, the company's PC shipments increased by 2.5% year-over-year in 2022 and commanded 9.8% of unit shipments, based on data from IDC.  

(Image credit: Counterpoint Research)

Given Apple's focus on laptops as well as steady demand for Arm-powered Chromebooks, 13% of mobile PCs sold last year used an Arm-based SoC, says Counterpoint. The share of notebooks with Arm inside is expected to increase to 15% this year, according to analysts. 

But while Apple's success with its Arm-based Macs is indisputable, most people use Windows machines, so once companies like MediaTek and Qualcomm introduce  their new Arm-powered SoCs for Windows in 2024, migration of mobile computers to Arm from x86 CPUs will accelerate. As a result, the share of Arm-based laptops will increase to 21% already in 2025 and then to 25% in 2027, predicts Counterpoint.  

(Image credit: Counterpoint Research)

Indeed, Qualcomm has very high hopes for its Snapdragon SoCs featuring Qryon general-purpose cores designed by Nuvia. These processors are now sampling with PC OEMs and the company claims that they intend to use these chips for laptops aimed at both consumer and enterprise users. 

"Our next-gen PC platform, with integrated custom Qualcomm Oryon CPUs and upgraded AI engine, has sampled on time and is exceeding our internal KPIs, delivering disruptive CPU performance per watt across tiers," a recent statement by the company reads. "We are now engaged with major PC OEMs, with multiple platform design wins across their product roadmaps for consumer and enterprise."

While Apple, MediaTek and Qualcomm will keep pushing performance and features of their Arm-based SoCs forward in the coming years, AMD and Intel will not stand still and watch how Arm is eating their lunch. Intel says that its laptop-focused Lunar Lake SoCs featuring a multi-tile design and a brand-new microarchitecture will offer performance-per-watt leadership.

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    I just hope some ARM-based models make a credible play for mid-market. I want an ARM-based laptop, but I'm sure not going to pay extra for one.

    Qualcomm has so far been positioning theirs as a premium product, and I think that's a huge mistake. Premium status must be earned. They'll do much better starting out by offering a superior value. Once their reputation has been established, then they can make a play for the up-market segment.

    Oh, and I don't care for Windows 11. Give me decent mainstream Linux support, too. If they can support ChromeOS, that should be easy.
    Reply
  • RichardtST
    Yeah. Bound to happen. Personally, I absolutely hate ARM assembly. Like, who the heck needs a barrel shifter or an assembler that can't handle constants with more than a few bits set at a time? OMG. Such garbage. That said, it is still smaller and faster than the x86 instruction set. ARM should, in theory, eventually blow away x86. Of course ARM isn't without it's own structural and bloating problems, which is why riscV is lurking... The x86 instruction architecture is so overbloated with useless instructions that it will, as is natural, collapse under it's own weight. AMD and Intel have one chance, right now, to strip it hard and remove 90% of the instruction set, restructure for speed and surprise us all.... or go the way of the dinosaurs.
    Reply
  • PlaneInTheSky
    My ARM laptop simply has much better battery life. I don't have the noisy fans like on x86 either.

    I could sort of mitigate the fan noise on x86 by turning off Turbo in the BIOS, but the laptops are still much noisier than ARM.

    If Steam Deck had been ARM based like Nintendo Switch, I might have kept it. But Steam deck is currently a giant pointless battery hogging x86 PC, I hate the noisy fans and I returned it.

    A mobile device without good battery life is pointless.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    RichardtST said:
    Yeah. Bound to happen. Personally, I absolutely hate ARM assembly. Like, who the heck needs a barrel shifter or an assembler that can't handle constants with more than a few bits set at a time? OMG. Such garbage. That said, it is still smaller and faster than the x86 instruction set. ARM should, in theory, eventually blow away x86. Of course ARM isn't without it's own structural and bloating problems, which is why riscV is lurking... The x86 instruction architecture is so overbloated with useless instructions that it will, as is natural, collapse under it's own weight. AMD and Intel have one chance, right now, to strip it hard and remove 90% of the instruction set, restructure for speed and surprise us all.... or go the way of the dinosaurs.

    I 100% agree with this, they should have done it with AMD64 IMO. If I were Intel/AMD I would start weening people off legacy instructions/software. There is very little reason why a DOS 1.0 application needs to run natively anymore for example, let MS and other OS makers emulate those modes if they still want to support them. They are going to need to do it for ARM anyway so Intel/AMD should use the opportunity to introduce a slim/efficient IS. Even development wise it only took about a year for most software compilers to add ARM support once Apple shifted, so it's not like it would be hard for languages to adapt, heck it would probably easier now that they already support two different ISs (in some cases 3 as some already support riscV), adding a 3rd/4th would probably be minimal effort.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    This is based on apple laptops taking off, and I doubt that apple fans will grow by such an amount in 5 years. Every apple fan already got one, if they replace their current one it will not increase the overall market share.
    Beyond that the arm based laptops will, at most, take the place of the eepc which I doubt ever had a big share.
    If ARM had such a big potential then AMD and Intel would be the first companies to release products in that market, ryzen was supposed to be a hybrid platform with ARM, they dropped that real fast.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    TerryLaze said:
    This is based on apple laptops taking off, and I doubt that apple fans will grow by such an amount in 5 years. Every apple fan already got one, if they replace their current one it will not increase the overall market share.
    Beyond that the arm based laptops will, at most, take the place of the eepc which I doubt ever had a big share.
    If ARM had such a big potential then AMD and Intel would be the first companies to release products in that market, ryzen was supposed to be a hybrid platform with ARM, they dropped that real fast.

    Qualcomm and Microsoft are partnered to release ARM based laptops using the same tech Apple did. It's being held up right now by Qualcomm and Arm Holdings fighting over price, but that will get resolved at some point in the next year most likely. I don't think you can ignore that. MS has updated all of their tool chains to support ARM. Apps from the MS Store can already contain both ARM and x86 fat binaries. Clearly MS thinks there is an opportunity with ARM.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    RichardtST said:
    I absolutely hate ARM assembly. Like, who the heck needs a barrel shifter or an assembler that can't handle constants with more than a few bits set at a time? OMG. Such garbage.
    I think it's pretty cool. Since instructions words are 32-bits (which is part of the key for making them fast & efficient to decode), immediate operands are necessarily limited to 12 bits. However, the immediate encoding scheme does something clever, by effectively giving you an 8-bit mantissa with a 4-bit exponent. The fact that it does a rotate seems like a clever hack to let you cover a few more cases than you could hit with a straight shift-left.

    https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/arm-immediate-value-encoding/

    RichardtST said:
    Of course ARM isn't without it's own structural and bloating problems, which is why riscV is lurking...
    RISC-V didn't arise because ARM was bloated, and that's also not why people are adopting it. They're adopting it because it's royalty-free and you're also free to pick & choose which extentions to support and you can even integrate your own custom extensions.

    ARM is very rigid on all of these points. Your main point of flexibility with ARM is simply to choose which revision of the ISA to support, and then there are just a couple optional extensions, like SVE (although SVE2 is now a mandatory part of ARMv9-A).

    RichardtST said:
    AMD and Intel have one chance, right now, to strip it hard and remove 90% of the instruction set, restructure for speed and surprise us all.... or go the way of the dinosaurs.
    It's a lot of work to add toolchain, OS, library, and application support for a new ISA. I highly doubt either Intel or AMD will invent a new one.

    If/when they leave x86, they'll probably jump on the RISC-V bandwagon. Before, they might've gone with ARM, but ever since Nvidia tried to buy it, I think they would've steered clear. Even now that the acquisition is off, the crazy lawsuit ARM leveled at Qualcomm for their Nuvia cores/acquisition is possibly worse for any CPU/SoC-makers thinking of designing their own cores.

    JamesJones44 said:
    Even development wise it only took about a year for most software compilers to add ARM support once Apple shifted, so it's not like it would be hard for languages to adapt,
    No...🤦
    ARM had done decades of work, leading up to that point. And even Apple had over a decade of work invested in ARM, from their iPods and iPhones. And even with all of that groundwork in place, it was probably more like 3 years to port over MacOS and all of their in-house software, SDKs, and libraries.

    ...not to mention Google and all of the Android developers, the Raspberry Pi community, all of the ARM embedded develpers, etc. All of them helped contribute to porting and improving compilers and software packages on ARM. Certainly some billions of engineering hours have gone into the ARM software ecosystem, even by the point when Apple started porting MacOS to it.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TerryLaze said:
    If ARM had such a big potential then AMD and Intel would be the first companies to release products in that market, ryzen was supposed to be a hybrid platform with ARM, they dropped that real fast.
    AMD launched the Opteron A1100 before the market was really ready for ARM servers.

    https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/hierofalcon-product-brief.pdf
    And the reason they furloughed the K12 is both the market immaturity and because they were virtually at the brink of bankruptcy. So, they wisely kept Zen and put the K12 on the back burner.
    Reply
  • I wouldn’t mind one, but yeah I don’t want to pay a premium price but I do want a good one
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    I’m literally awaiting for Lenovo to update their ARM laptops to see if I can have my Linux workstation that has long battery life.
    Reply