ARM on Windows will never take off if they keep relying on these silly inefficient mobile SOC's from qualcom. Really they need to be getting in bed with a company like Ampere who seem to be one of a select few developing high power ARM SOCs.
I'm probably wrong about this because I've only cobbled it together from reading various ARM-related submissions, but I think that their license probably doesn't allow it. You need a special license to design your own state-of-the-art workstation/gaming desktop-class ARM CPU. And on top of that, Microsoft and Qualcomm had or have an agreement with some degree of exclusivity.
> Microsoft and Qualcomm had or have an agreement with some degree of exclusivity
People keep referencing an agreement between Microsoft and Qualcomm without either company ever acknowledging that such an agreement exists.
According to Ian Cutriss (formerly of Anandtech), his contact at Qualcomm told him that there is no such exclusivity agreement.
>I spoke with Qualcomm about this exclusivity deal - they said there isn't one. Simply put, they put engineers, $$$, and time with Microsoft to optimizing Windows on Arm for Qualcomm. Anyone else would have to do their own specific optimizations and work with Microsoft to do that, but no-one has.
I was referring to performance, not power consuption. Although as has been pointed out the M1 is vastly more power efficient than anything qualcom produces and they still don't come close to the performance levels.
