Emerging Trends and Use Cases
Chapter 3
There are several emerging trends and use cases in the laptop market that are influencing today’s Windows on Arm devices and providing significant proof points to demonstrate the strength of the Windows on Arm offering versus traditional PC and laptop architectures.
These are:
Hybrid working;
Demand for AI and ML-based features, and;
Demand for more advanced compute workloads.
All these use cases require high IPC and multiprocess concurrency across applications for work (creative and productivity) and play (multimedia).
Laptops with thin-and-light form factors simply perform better with Arm CPUs. Based on common and emerging laptop use cases in such form factors, Arm CPUs deliver a superior laptop experience for consumers. They are also better on absolute performance, as there is a greatly reduced need to throttle Arm CPUs during heavy compute workloads than for the increasingly power-hungry competition.
The global workforce movement toward hybrid working is putting increasing demand on performance-heavy CPU workloads.
Video conferencing is one example, especially on calls with hundreds of participants, as this creates networking-heavy loads on the CPUs that can impact performance. Smooth, uninterrupted video conferencing requires sustained performance, which is where Arm CPUs thoroughly outclass the competition.
Moreover, multitasking on laptop devices by running video conferencing, web browsing, and many different productivity applications concurrently places yet more strain on the CPU and the thermal limits of a laptop chassis. Again, such demands on laptop devices are where Arm CPUs excel.
These examples highlight the need for high levels of efficient performance on modern and future laptop devices. This enables applications that require heavy workloads on the CPU to perform strongly and last a long time, while not overheating the laptop device.
As the power demands of x86 platforms have marched upward in recent years, Arm CPUs have excelled at providing increased rates of performance improvements, all while maintaining industry-leading levels of power efficiency that deliver multi-day battery life benefits on laptop devices.
The various CPU designs and configurations across Arm Cortex-X and Cortex-A support a broad range of video and audio-rich entertainment applications, while continuing support for the most commonly used productivity applications.
Arm-based SoC designs for laptop devices use the DynamIQ multicore system design, which combines Arm Cortex-X, ‘big’ and/or ‘LITTLE’ CPU cores into a single, fully integrated solution. These ‘big.LITTLE’ CPUs provide advanced compute capabilities, faster responsiveness, and increased power savings that are core benefits for the modern PC and laptop user.
While other architectures have attempted to partially imitate some of the benefits of Arm’s approach, they still radically trail behind on the purpose-built, power-efficiency, and unified programmability advantages that big.LITTLE offers. These important benefits have been achieved through holistic engineering designs, over a decade of refinement, and tight technical partnerships with the operating system (OS) vendors.
One of the most exciting areas across PC, laptops and all consumer devices is the rapid expansion and availability of AI-based applications, ushering in the AI PC era. Microsoft is responding with rapid and compelling updates across its productivity and creative applications, like Copilot, that leverage the latest and greatest advances in AI and ML.
Windows on Arm provides a stronger path for AI and ML, with these workloads, like generative AI large language models (LLMs), running best on Arm-based technologies and CPUs. Arm’s own AI ecosystem combines hardware, software, and thousands of diverse partners to accelerate development and bring the latest ML features to life.
At Arm, we are constantly evolving technologies that enable ML across the computing system. These continuous engineering investments have led to Arm becoming the world’s most pervasive AI computing platform. Around 90 percent of the world’s AI workloads run on Arm CPUs.
On mobile, 85 percent of today’s smartphones rely on Arm for their AI workloads, which means four billion people worldwide are running AI on Arm-powered devices. This includes ML workloads used daily by consumers, such as keyword or object detection and speech recognition.
ML workloads have filtered through to today’s laptop devices that use a range of AI and ML-based features to deliver proactive assistance to the user. In the future, AI and ML on laptop devices will expand to more advanced use cases, including algorithm components to enable the latest large language models (LLMs) to run within the limited memory bandwidth of mobile devices.
Arm’s SVE2 is a future-looking technology built into the Armv9 architecture that improves the suitability of Arm Cortex CPUs for applications that require greater compute capabilities for data processing and advanced workloads.
This makes SVE2 an incredibly useful technology for compute-intensive ML and data processing on laptop devices, as well as the acceleration of common algorithms for domains such as computer vision. SVE2 accelerates processing for domains such as feature detection, image classification and recognition, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation.
Arm Total Compute Solutions for laptop SoC designs combine Arm Cortex-X and Cortex-A CPUs built on the Armv9 architecture with software improvements to deliver the compute requirements that enable AI and ML-based features and experiences on laptop devices. These feed into wider applications with AI and ML capabilities enhancing user experiences for the latest camera and imaging use cases. Arm is also working closely with OS vendors to enable future ML-powered features in their roadmaps for end users, including tapping into the great potential of LLMs.
The growing demand for more advanced workloads across laptop devices has been partly fueled by the hybrid working trend, with more people working from home and running compute-intensive workloads, such as creative applications and developer builds that heavily draw on many CPU threads.
These workloads require uplifts in performance, while maintaining a responsive, cool, and quiet system within a slim laptop form factor. Just like the hybrid working use case, this requires strong levels of efficient performance.
A key value of the Arm architecture and CPU technologies is our relentless focus on efficiency improvements. Arm is continually increasing performance, while enabling Arm-based SoCs to fit into slim form factor designs. This is a track record that is unmatched by our competitors, with Windows on Arm pushing the boundaries of both performance and efficiency.
The Armv9 architecture, combined with our Total Compute Solutions offers end-to-end system optimizations to deliver a highly responsive platform for a premium UI, so that these applications launch quickly and perform well. Plus, Arm Cortex CPUs are designed and optimized for the specific kinds of multithreaded workloads commonly used across core laptop use cases.
Learn more about Arm’s latest v9 Cortex CPUs at the following links:
https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/announcements/posts/cortex-x4-cpu-performance
https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/announcements/posts/arm-cortex-a720-and-cortex-a520-cpus
Learn more about SVE2 on developer.arm.com.
