Microsoft has been working on a special chip for data centers for a long time, and recently also a chip for an AI server called Athena. But now they are said to want to make Arm-based chips for PC devices.

Based on the Windows Latest report, Microsoft is creating a new team to work on the Arm chip that will be used in the Surface product line. The report also lists a number of job vacancies opened by Microsoft to strengthen the team

A number of these vacancies have now been removed, however, it can be seen that Microsoft is building a team of senior engineers specializing in system on a chip (SoC) manufacturing, high-performance CPUs and GPUs, and firmware development.

One of the vacancies also indicated that a team was tasked with developing chips for Surface, Xbox, HoloLens and Azure.

From this report, it can be assumed that Microsoft wants to follow the success of Apple Silicon, namely the M series of chips for Mac devices that offer high performance with low power consumption.

But even this move seems inconsistent with Microsoft's principles, which rely on a broader hardware ecosystem from companies such as AMD, Intel and Nvidia.

What's more, Microsoft currently has an exclusive partnership with Qualcomm to deliver Arm-based chips, for example the Snapdragon SQ3 used in the Surface Pro 9. Although so far it hasn't been able to show its strength.

Then on the other hand there is also MediaTek which wants to penetrate the Arm PC market in the next few years.