Microsoft is making a big bet on the future with new Windows PCs on ARM that will hit the market this summer and confident of beating Apple in performance, AI task acceleration, and app compatibility, as said The Verge sources familiar with his plans.

Microsoft, with its Windows, is the biggest defender of the Intel-powered x86 architecture, and together with the “Wintel” alliance, they completely dominated the client PC market for two decades. However, nothing lasts forever and other hardware architectures have emerged as alternatives. And with great success, as Apple demonstrated in its transition from x86 to its own ARM chips.

However, the idea of ​​bringing ARM to PCs it is not new and Microsoft itself has been trying to do this for more than a decade, since the launch of the Surface RT tablet. It was a fiasco that caused $900 million in losses and, according to some sources, the definitive reason why CEO Steve Ballmer was replaced by Satya Nadella as chief executive. Subsequently, Microsoft promoted (along with Qualcomm hardware) the “Windows on ARM” platform. That didn’t work either. And the reasons remain the same than ten years ago: severe performance problems and the inability to run most Win32 applications on Windows.

Windows PC on ARM: Now?

Microsoft believes that Qualcomm’s new SoC, the Snapdragon So confident is it that it is planning a series of demos that will show how these processors They are faster than Apple’s owneven when launching applications, the main source of Windows crashes on ARM computers.

Microsoft says in internal documents that it sees The Vergewhich these new Windows on ARM computers will have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2”an application compatibility layer used by Apple to translate applications originally compiled for Intel x86 processors to Apple’s own ARM processors.

Supporting the vast Windows ecosystem, and especially the Win32 applications that Microsoft would like to destroy, but which are used by millions of users, is a titanic task that the company has not been able to solve. Actually, app emulation was a major problem run viable Windows on ARM.

The introduction of x64 emulation for Windows 11 two years ago is a temporary solution until native ARM64 versions like the new Chrome browser we saw a few weeks ago hit the market. It is clear that native applicationdeveloped specifically for ARM, are the definitive solution, but we’ll see if all software providers are willing to invest. A month ago Microsoft announced the global expansion of its ARM Advisory Servicewhich will help developers create Windows-optimized applications on Arm devices.

If Microsoft’s confidence comes true, this could all mean a sea change in the laptop landscape, offering consumers a compelling alternative to Apple’s Macs. We’ll see.