By Max A. Charney
TAIPEI/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Taiwanese semiconductor designer MediaTek is developing Arm-based personal computer chips that will run on Microsoft's Windows operating system, three people familiar with the matter said.
Microsoft last month unveiled a new generation of laptops with chips designed with Arm Holdings technology that have enough processing power to run artificial intelligence applications that executives call the future of consumer computing — an effort that the MediaTek chips are geared toward.
The software company's plans take aim at Apple, which has been releasing its own Arm-based chips for its Mac computers for about four years, and Microsoft's decision to optimize Windows for Arm could threaten Intel's long-held dominance in the PC market.
MediaTek and Microsoft declined to comment.
MediaTek's PC chips are scheduled to be available at the end of next year when its exclusive laptop chip supply deal with Qualcomm expires, two of the people said. The chips are based on Arm's off-the-shelf designs, and using off-the-shelf, tested chip parts means less design work, significantly speeding up development.
It was not immediately clear whether Microsoft had approved MediaTek's PC chips for its Copilot+ Windows program.
Arm executives said their customer built the already-designed chip in about nine months using off-the-shelf parts, whereas MediaTek's chip was not yet designed. For experienced chip designers, building and testing an advanced chip typically takes more than a year, depending on the complexity.
Microsoft tapped Qualcomm in 2016 to lead an effort to move its Windows operating system to Arm, the underlying processor architecture that has long powered smartphones and their tiny batteries. Reuters reported last year that Microsoft had awarded Qualcomm a contract to exclusively develop Arm-based Windows-compatible chips through 2024.
With Qualcomm's exclusivity agreement with Microsoft expiring, other designers have opted to develop chips to help drive Microsoft's adoption of its latest Arm designs. For decades, Windows machines have relied on chip architectures made by Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
Reuters reported last year that Nvidia and AMD were working on Arm designs for Windows machines, with Nvidia's PC chip work involving collaboration from MediaTek, according to people familiar with the matter. Two of the people said MediaTek's PC chip work was separate from its partnership with Nvidia.
(Reporting by Max A. Charney in San Francisco; Editing by Kenneth Lee and Josie Kao)
