MediaTek had recently announced its plans of taking on Qualcomm’s monopoly on Arm-based chipsets for Windows PCs. This announcement sparked a debate as Qualcomm and Microsoft reportedly inked a special deal wherein the Chipmaker enjoys the exclusivity around such chipsets for Windows PCs.
That said, exclusivity isn’t the ideal solution in case you want to see any innovation to experience mass adoption. As it turns out, the said deal between Qualcomm and Microsoft is reportedly coming to an end thus opening doors for other chipset makers with Arm-based SoC to run Windows on their devices.
While MediaTek is still developing its hardware solution, Apple stands to get the maximum benefit once the exclusivity ends. Its M1 chips have received rave reviews and since the company has offered Windows support on its Intel-powered Mac devices, chances are that we might see the same happening on the M1 powered devices.
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As of now, if you have an M1 powered Mac then using a virtual machine is the only way to run Windows. However, once Qualcomm’s exclusivity ends, M1 Macs will be able to run Windows natively thus offering a much better experience.
The XDA report cites internal sources who said that the deal is about to expire soon allowing Microsoft to license Windows on other Arm chipset makers. Though the report doesn’t specify when the deal will expire.
To recall, both Microsoft and Qualcomm collaboratively started working on Arm chipsets back in 2016. This was considered to be a breakthrough as the new chipsets did not require a different version of Windows to work on such computing devices. Instead, these could support the ported versions of Windows 64 bit and 32 bit.
That said, the initial outcomes of this collaboration weren’t up to the mark and both the Snapdragon 8cx, SQ1 didn’t impress as much as the M1 chipsets from Apple.
Recently, Qualcomm’s Dr James Thompson announced that the company is working on a new generation of Arm chipsets that will be at par with Apple’s M1 chips in terms of performance and he also stated that the company wants to remain the preferred platform for PCs.
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