Opinion: Why Nvidia, MediaTek May Enter The PC CPU Market Soon

While the fast-growing AI PC category represents a new way to stay relevant for traditional CPU players Intel and AMD, it also represents an opportunity for Qualcomm, Nvidia and MediaTek—with help from Microsoft—to chip away at the x86 CPU duopoly.

The PC market for CPUs is set to get crowded with AI computing giant Nvidia and Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek reportedly set to enter the segment this year.

While several reports have pointed to PC CPU development activities by the two companies over the past couple of years, executives at Intel and Arm have openly acknowledged that Intel, AMD and Qualcomm are set to face more competition soon.

“Everybody is really excited about the PC market, so we have more competitors than we’ve ever had. You will see more competitors enter the marketplace in 2025, and we’re going to have to be on our toes and making sure that we’re winning,” said Michelle Johnston Holthaus, one of Intel’s interim co-CEOs, at an investor event last month.

Those comments came months after a similar suggestion was made last year by the CEO of Arm, which licenses the Arm instruction set architecture and Arm-based chip designs to third parties such as Qualcomm and Apple to develop their own CPUs.

The CEO, Rene Haas, told Reuters in an interview that he expects Arm-based CPUs to pose a significant challenge to x86-based CPUs from Intel and AMD over the next few years, thanks to Qualcomm and other companies entering the space. (This projection is apparently notwithstanding Arm’s legal dispute with Qualcomm, which ended in a mixed verdict in December, leading the company to seek a new trial).

“Arm’s market share in Windows—I think, truly, in the next five years, it could be better than 50 percent,” Haas said in the June 2024 interview.

What Nvidia And MediaTek Could Be Planning

Multiple reports have suggested that new Arm-based chips for PCs could be on the way from Nvidia and MediaTek. Both companies currently design Arm-based CPUs for other segments, with Nvidia focused on servers and edge computers while MediaTek is focused on Chromebooks, smartphones and smart devices.

A June 2024 report from Reuters, for instance, said MediaTek plans to introduce a line of Arm-based processors for Windows PCs near the end of this year.

The Reuters report said the MediaTek chips are designed for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program, which kicked off last June with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips and then expanded to new x86 chips from Intel and AMD for testing in December.

Separately, MediaTek is working with Nvidia on another line of Arm-based chips for Windows PCs, according to Reuters. This product line, also rumored for late 2025, is expected to combine a MediaTek CPU with an Nvidia GPU on a system-on-chip, according to other reports.

Nvidia is also planning a solo line of Arm-based chips using its own CPU and GPU designs for Windows PCs, DigiTimes in Taiwan reported last October. The company may potentially introduce the chips in September of this year.

Why MediaTek And Nvidia May Be Making PC Chips

MediaTek and Nvidia are reportedly planning to enter the PC CPU market during what vendors hope could be the PC’s biggest inflection point in more than a decade.

I’m talking, of course, about the AI PC, which a wide range of vendors, including Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, HP Inc., Dell Technologies and Lenovo, have been clamoring about as the next big thing in personal computing for more than a year.

These companies are hoping that the explosion in demand for AI applications, which have largely been cloud-based up until this point, will translate into a need for AI applications that that take advantage of a PC’s CPU, GPU and NPU to improve responsiveness, privacy and personalization while reducing costs and unlocking new experiences.

Despite these lofty promises, vendors have yet to make a definitive case for the existence of the AI PC, as I wrote in a previous CRN opinion piece, and this is largely due to the slow rollout of new features and applications from the likes of Microsoft, Apple and ISVs.

Microsoft has also been forced to pump the brakes on its flagship Recall feature for Copilot+ PCs due to security and privacy concerns. While the feature was originally set for release last June, it only became available in October to members of the Windows Insider Community for testing after Microsoft implemented new safeguards.

But while there has been a shortage of widely available software that takes advantage of AI PCs, that is likely to change this year with Microsoft, Apple and ISVs primed to release more applications and features that make a more compelling case for the nascent category.

With this expectation, research firms IDC and Gartner believe that AI PCs will grow fast and represent a substantial portion, if not a majority, of personal computers that get shipped by vendors over the next few years. IDC, for example, has forecasted that AI PC shipments will more than triple between 2024 and 2027 to represent 60 percent of total PC shipments across the world by the end of that period.

While this represents a new way to stay relevant for traditional CPU players Intel and AMD, it also represents an opportunity for Qualcomm, Nvidia and MediaTek to gain a foothold in the market and chip away at the x86 CPU duopoly.

The move to release a CPU for PCs would echo Nvidia’s data center strategy, in which it has sought to own a larger share of computations by introducing its own Arm-based CPU that is tuned to optimize system performance in conjunction with its GPUs.

It’s worth noting that Nvidia has already done significant groundwork in enabling and accelerating the development of AI PC applications that take advantage of its RTX GPU. For instance, the company announced last June the Nvidia RTX AI Toolkit, which allows developers to customize, optimize and deploy generative AI models on RTX AI PCs.

Meanwhile, MediaTek’s entry into the PC CPU market would represent a lateral move from the Arm-based CPUs it designs for Chromebooks.

Why Microsoft Plays A Big Role In New CPU Contenders

The other force that is likely driving Nvidia and MediaTek to release their own PC CPUs is none other than Microsoft, which has spent the past several years developing and hardening Windows support for Arm processors.

Microsoft has shown that it is very interested in fighting against the popularity of Apple’s Mac computers—which have been using custom, Arm-based chips since 2020—by partnering with whichever chip company it can to push the boundaries for performance, efficiency and new experiences on Windows.

When it came to the June launch of its Copilot+ PC program, Qualcomm was in the right place at the right time to make all the difference. Meanwhile, Copilot+ features have yet to become generally available for PCs powered by the latest x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

In other words, we’re far away from the days of the “Wintel” Windows-Intel alliance or even the idea of Windows being synonymous with the x86 architecture. Microsoft is now approaching chip architecture with a more open mind.

With Microsoft’s partnership with Qualcomm serving as part of a larger effort to make Arm viable for Windows PCs, the CPU plans by Nvidia and MediaTek could further the tech giant’s agenda by giving it more options for chips that enable game-changing experiences.