Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip is one of the more interesting prospects for the PC over the next 12 months.1 Now, Arm's head honcho has revealed that there will be more PC-optimized Cpus in the coming years.

One of the soon-to-be interesting options for newcomers to Arm CPUs for the Pc market may be Nvidia.1 But hold on to that idea and we'll come back to it. Arm CEO Rene Haas, speaking to investors (via the register), predicted that it would follow in Qualcomm's footsteps by offering an Arm-based chip explicitly designed for PCs.

"Everything I hear is saying there will be multiple suppliers serving that market over the next 12 to 36 months," Haas believes. Anyone who wants to make such a chip must have a license agreement with Arm and put Haas in a good position to determine where the industry is going. Unfortunately, Haas does not offer any insight into the identity of these new players of Arm chips for PCs. 

Still, the end result, according to Haas, is that Arm chips will make significant strides into the PC market. "I think it will be time for the Arm ecosystem to take a significant level of market share, largely because of the level of experience we have seen in other ecosystems, great

He certainly has a point about battery life and efficiency. Arm chips tend to have obvious advantages over traditional x86cpus in these areas.

However, software support has so far been a major obstacle in migrating pcs from X86 to Arm. As recently as the third quarter of last year, Arm chips accounted for only 1% of the PC market.

It's not yet clear whether this new, er, army of Arm chips can actually make a dent in the PC market. Qualcomm is making a big claim about the new 6-core Snapdragon X Elite CPU, which is expected to be sold on laptops from May 12.

But even if it was offered in terms of raw performance, perhaps the most important test is that it and the Arm version of Windows will not run traditional x86 code, and if it runs fairly smoothly, the Arm laptop can be very attractive.

Imagine a fanless laptop with a performance comparable to an existing portable, although the battery life is a few days. For mainstream use, it becomes super attractive.

Of course, if there is an application type that causes problems with the emulated x86 code on the Arm chip, it will be a game. Qualcomm showed off the title of the Legacy x86 running in emulation with decent performance on the x Elite Silicon. But it's far from clear whether the kind of experience will be universal, or whether Qualcomm has carefully chosen games that happen to run okay or actually that

Similarly, Qualcomm has said that the chips can be combined with individual GPUs, but it's not clear whether such a system will work when the first X Elite laptops are launched. It is not clear whether there is actually a difference between the two.

It seems that in the short term it will probably not exist. Similarly, there is no sign of an imminent push to the X Elite desktop. All of this means that we're still a few years away, at least, before we see something like an Arm-based game rig.

Still, it's interesting to speculate on the identity of newcomers to the PC CPU market alongside Qualcomm. Arguably the most influential may be Nvidia.

To be sure, Nvidia has a good reason to want to enter the Arm CPU market. It does not have and probably can not get an x86 license. And as recent failed efforts to actually get the whole of Arm itself show, Nvidia is interested in Arm Cpus. And of course, as you can see in the picture above, Nvidia uses Arm cores for Grace data center CPUs.

There is no doubt that we can offer a complete Nvidia PC that combines nvidia GPUs with Nvidia CPUs. In addition, if any company has the ability and resources to run critical pc games well on an Arm chip, it should be Nvidia. It was also in this area that Nvidia was talking about the possibility of collaborating with Mediatek on Arm Cpus.

For now, the idea of an Arm-based gaming PC remains fairly theoretical, and will continue to be so even if the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite delivers on all its promises in a month's time. But if Nvidia moved to Arm Cpus for OC, it would literally be a game change.