If we know anything about Microsoft, they’ll get there. This is their second (recent) try at getting ARM off the ground (first was SQ1 which had a much lower adoption rate). Feedback about them has been mostly positive, but mostly from people who use regular office and web apps.
Most major app developers seem to be on-board, and I’ve seen a lot of small developers starting to provide beta versions.
This time does feel different. The x64 emulation through Prism is a technological marvel and they just got AVX512 working which means that a lot more games will start to work. For companies that due pursue native ARM64 support, it's not all or nothing, there are ways to iteratively bring over pieces of that app. They also have this new App Assure program where they are working with both their customers as well as 3rd party app developers to get as much compatibility with existing apps as possible. Microsoft's previous attempts were silo'd platforms that weren't compatible at all with existing apps, so to me I see this eventually taking off like you say.
I don't think any games require AVX512 but the current x64 release emulator doesn't support AVX or AVX2 either which is needed by some games. The preview release of Windows for ARM does add support for AVX/AVX2.
What is their incentive? Intel fixed their mobile battery life issues, so why should Microsoft care anymore? Furthermore why should app developers care? And then why should consumers care?
As long as x86 performance / efficiency is in the ballpark, which it is (mostly). No one is going to bother.
It's like Intel provides just the car exterior and frame while TSMC provides the engine, entertainment system, tires, et al.
Also TSMC makes Intel's recent GPU chips.
Everyone is looking at the next Intel CPU, codenamed Panther Lake, which is supposed to return to the Intel fold and be Intel-only-fabricated chip sometime in 2025.
In the Lunar Lake wikipedia article, a Goldman Sachs analysis states that Intel is spending about 10% of revenue ($5.6B) for TSMC foundry services in 2024, expected to almost double in 2025.
Apple uses TSMC's 2nd gen 3nm process node.
Intel uses TSMC's 1st gen 3nm process node for its compute tile.
AMD uses TSMC's 1st gen 3nm process node for the Zen 5c core, 4nm for the other parts of the chip.
Qualcomm uses TSMC's 4nm process node for Snapdragon X Elite.
Qualcomm has the most to improve when it goes to smaller process node, while AMD is halfway there with its mobile CPUs. Intel is already at the smallest process node available, until TSMC (or more likely Apple stops buying) gets more capacity at smaller/more efficient process nodes.
During the early to mid-2010s, Intel has shown that they'll take their sweet time providing CPU improvements to customers (app developers and computer users) if they have no competition (and they hide from the public how poorly their new fabs are doing).
Indeed. The most important apps already have native Windows ARM builds: 7Zip, Notepad++, Firefox, Sumatra PDF etc. It's pretty usable for Average Joes.
It's funny how Google finally caved in a d released a Chrome build for Windows ARM after many years of avoiding it to not enable Microsoft's Arm product to compete with their Chromebooks.
Most major app developers seem to be on-board, and I’ve seen a lot of small developers starting to provide beta versions.