Industry analyst Canalys predicts that ARM chips will account for 30% of the PC market by 2026. (opens in new tab) It also predicts that half of the cloud server market (opens in new tab), currently dominated by x86 CPUs, will migrate to ARM processors by the same time. But what does this mean for gaming PCs?

Steve Brazier, president and CEO of Canalys, believes that "it's an industry-changing anomaly that simply hasn't been taken seriously enough."

Depending on how you define a PC, ARM chips are already in a significant portion of the market. (Open in new tab) And Apple has a surprisingly high 13.5 percent share of the PC market; ARM chips are also found in a wide variety of inexpensive Chromebooks.

Other analysts are somewhat more conservative when it comes to ARM's overall market share in PCs. However, another analyst group, Mercury Research, believes that ARM's share of PC processors has doubled from 7% in mid-2021 to just over 13% today. This is a dramatic increase by any measure.

Of course, you wouldn't want to use a Mac or Chromebook as your main gaming device. But Apple's M1 and M2 chips (open in new tab) have proven that ARM can compete with traditional x86 CPUs on raw performance.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm is making big claims about its own new custom-designed Oryon ARM core, due out next year. (Qualcomm's goal is to compete with Apple's M1 and M2 chips.

If Qualcomm achieves this, it will be competitive with Intel and AMD's x86 chips in terms of pure performance. The problem then becomes one of software support. Porting critical software such as games and graphics drivers from x86 to ARM is a daunting task.

Thus, while it is quite possible that a large portion of the PC market will be running on ARM within a few years, it will take much longer for gaming PCs to migrate to ARM. gaming PCs with ARM are one of those hot new technologies that is always just over the horizon. Long predicted, it doesn't seem to be that close to actually happening.