The Windows on Arm Opportunity
Chapter 1
Laptop users demand an increasingly mobile experience, with designs and features built around how they interact with their smartphone devices. The expectation is that today’s laptops have multi-day battery life, turn on instantly from an idle state, and can connect to the internet via wireless networks, such as LTE and 5G, without the need for Wi-Fi. And all of these advantages must be presented in a thin and lightweight form factor with high thermal efficiency.
Windows on Arm devices are at the heart of this laptop transformation. Arm Total Compute solutions, CPU processor technologies and architecture provide the mobile features and benefits necessary to deliver optimum device experiences for consumers. This means:
Multi-day battery life for continuous untethered productivity.
Instant on so users can return to their tasks almost straight away.
The ability to stay connected ‘on-the-go’ for continuous productivity.
Thinner, lighter, cooler devices that are easy to carry around and do not generate excessive heat.
Today’s Windows on Arm laptop devices provide a comprehensive offering for a wide range of users and use cases, while being relevant to modern and future computing demands. Beyond core productivity experiences, Windows on Arm laptop devices are being used for a broad range of advanced workloads, from video conferencing and multitasking to creative and multimedia applications, to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) use cases. These are being driven by consumer demands and trends, such as hybrid working and a greater demand for AI and ML-based features. These emerging use cases and trends are explored in more detail in Chapter 3.
Supporting the strong hardware capabilities across Windows on Arm laptops is a growing developer ecosystem that is gathering momentum and bringing yet more performance benefits to consumers. Thanks in part to the expanded Microsoft software development kit (SDK) support available for Windows on Arm, more Windows developers are targeting the devices with their applications. This is being led by application vendors, including Spotify, Firefox, Adobe Photoshop, Netflix, VLC, and Zoom, that are now targeting their applications natively for Windows on Arm .
This growing momentum is supported by positive developer attitudes toward Windows and Arm and its potential.
In a joint Arm and Microsoft survey, half of all respondents believe that Windows on Arm will constitute 24 percent or more of the PC market in the next five years. If this plays out, it will represent one of the largest shifts in PC architecture in decades. The benefits of the Windows on Arm developer ecosystem to the laptop devices are explored in Chapter 4.
Arm is making these experiences possible. Built on the pervasive Arm architecture, our family of Arm Cortex CPUs deliver the required laptop-class performance alongside best-in-class efficiency.
Arm Cortex-X CPU cores are designed for ultimate peak performance: ‘big’ CortexA7x CPU cores for the perfect balance of sustained compute performance with best-in-class efficiency; and ’LITTLE’ Cortex-A5x CPU cores for maximum power efficiency.
For laptop system-on-chip (SoC) designs, Arm offers a variety of CPU configurations that support up to 20 cores, or even more. These deliver peak performance capabilities that meet the needs of existing productivity experiences and a broad range of new advanced laptop use cases.
Alongside the performance and efficiency benefits outlined above, the Arm architecture provides integrated features for the laptop market that support AI and ML workloads, like Scalable Vector Extension two (SVE2), and advanced security, which includes a range of defensive execution technologies.
For security, the latest Armv9 architecture improvements remove up to 95 percent of certain classes of vulnerabilities, including memory safety violations that account for the majority of all serious security bugs. Applying security features such as Arm's Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and pointer authentication codes (PAC) as part of the wider Arm CPU adoption, provides profound security, cost, and time-to-market benefits for OEMs.
Windows on Arm is gathering pace and looks set to become a true disruptive force in the global laptop market. According to an Arm Consumer Tech survey, 63 percent of respondents predict that increased acceptance of newer notebook architectures will support the most mass-market innovation in the next five years.
For OEMs, there is a significant opportunity to capitalize on this growing momentum, which is why Windows on Arm is worth exploring here in more detail.
