Qualcomm CEO says Arm taking 50% of the Windows PC market in five years is realistic — some OEMs expect Snapdragon chips to be 60% of their sales within three years

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon held a question-and-answer session with the press here at Computex 2024 in Taipei, Taiwan, as the company drives home its go-to-market message around its Snapdragon X Elite processors and celebrates its ecosystem of partners. I asked Amon what he thinks about Arm CEO Rene Haas's recent statement that he expects Arm chips to comprise 50% of the Windows PC market within the next five years and whether that is a realistic goal. 

Amon affirmed the possibility of Arm taking 50% of the Windows PC market share in five years, and even said that some OEMs already plan for up to 60% of their Windows PC sales to be Snapdragon-equipped laptops within the next three years. Here's a transcript of the exchange:

"The CEO of Arm said yesterday that he's aiming for Arm to comprise 50% of the Windows PC market within the next five years. What are your thoughts on that?" I asked. "Do you think that's realistic, and how much of that do you think Qualcomm can address with Snapdragon chips?"

"Well, I like that; we're doing all the work," Amon responded, to laughter from the assembled press. "I will subscribe to that." 

"Different OEMs are talking a little bit differently," Amon explained. "I like, for example, some of the things that some OEMs said in their earnings calls. How they think about this is changing. Some OEMs are talking about 40 to 60% of their total sales within three years. I also saw some OEMs talking about 50%, but those are the order of magnitudes. That's kind of the opportunity that we have."

"The reason this is important, because this sometimes gets missed in this whole conversation, is that, historically, in the PC market, there's a new version of Windows, and this new version of Windows will take a long time to go through adoption," Amon said. "For example, in the enterprise some enterprises are still running Windows 10, and those that were running Windows 7 took a long time to get Windows 10 — but this is different."

"This is a Windows change to Copilot+, and you'll see this huge push to say this is a new type of machine. This is a machine that increases productivity and has some new use cases, and it now has a more comprehensive suite of Copilot, so I expect the transition this time will be faster than any other version of Windows. So I think that's going to be a bigger sell. And I think there's some logic behind those numbers, and we're doing a tremendous amount through many journeys to try to bring the Oryon CPU that works on the ARM instruction set to this industry," Amon concluded.