Written by Max A. Cherny
TAIPEI/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Taiwanese chip design giant MediaTek is developing an Arm-based personal computer chip that will power Microsoft Corp's (NASDAQ:) Windows operating system, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Last month, Microsoft unveiled a new generation of laptops featuring chips designed with arm Technology Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:) provides enough power to power the artificial intelligence applications that executives said are the future of consumer computing. The MediaTek chip is geared towards this effort.
The software company's plans target Apple (NASDAQ:), which has released its own Arm-based chips for Mac computers for about four years. Microsoft's decision to improve Windows for Arm could threaten Intel's (NASDAQ:) long-standing dominance in the PC market.
MediaTek and Microsoft declined to comment.
MediaTek's PC chip is scheduled to launch late next year after Qualcomm's (NASDAQ:) exclusive deal to supply chips for laptops expires, two of the people said. The chip is based on off-the-shelf Arm designs, which can significantly speed up the development process since less design work is needed using off-the-shelf and tested chip components.
It was not immediately clear whether Microsoft has approved MediaTek's PC chip for the Copilot+ Windows program.
Arm executives said one of its customers used off-the-shelf components to build a chip in nearly nine months for an already completed design, which is not the case with MediaTek. For experienced chip design companies, advanced chips typically take more than a year to build and test, depending on complexity.
In 2016, Microsoft appointed Qualcomm to lead the port of Windows to Arm's processor core architecture, which has long powered smartphones and their small batteries. Microsoft has given Qualcomm an exclusive arrangement to develop Arm-based Windows-compatible chipsets until 2024, Reuters reported last year.
As Qualcomm's exclusivity deal with Microsoft is about to expire, other designers have opted to create chips to help power Microsoft's latest endeavor to use Arm designs. For decades, Windows devices have relied on chip architecture made by Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:) and Intel.
Reuters reported last year that Nvidia (NASDAQ:) and AMD were working on Arm designs for Windows devices. Nvidia's efforts for its own PC chip include help from MediaTek, according to a person familiar with the matter. MediaTek's efforts for the PC chip are separate from its collaboration with Nvidia, two of the people said.