First Windows on ARM64 devices will arrive in 2017 holiday season

If you're following Microsoft news, there's a chance you've already heard about Microsoft and Qualcomm partnering on bringing the full Windows 10 experience to ARM64 CPU-powered devices. This Windows edition will support running all UWP apps but will also introduce support for running x86 applications on devices with ARM processors. We haven't heard much about it since the first introduction back in December 2016, but Qualcomm officials have finally announced the date of arrival for the first bunch of devices with Windows on ARM64.

During yesterday's Qualcomm Q2 2017 earnings call, their CEO Steve Mollenkopf announced that such devices will be available on the market in Q4 2017, meaning October - December timeframe, just in time for the holiday season.

We have an opportunity to disrupt the existing suppliers of the PC and the datacenter. Our Snapdragon 835 is expanding into Mobile PC designs running Windows 10, which are scheduled to launch in the fourth calendar quarter this year. In the data center, we announced the collaboration with Microsoft and demonstrated Windows Server Running on our 10 nanometer Qualcomm Centriq processors, the first 10 nanometer server processors in the industry.

In partnership with Qualcomm, Microsoft will bring Windows 10 to the upcoming Snapdragon 835 ARM CPU. Snapdragon 835 is next generation CPU which will be able to run Win32 apps through a special emulation of the x86 platform. Devices using Snapdragon 835 or later CPUs will be able to run classic 32-bit desktop apps but not native 64-bit desktop programs yet.

Even heavy apps like 32-bit Photoshop can be used in that environment.

Most of the early devices will be utilizing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 CPU. It will, however, take some time for the majority of OEMs to adopt this new CPU architecture, so don't expect a wide range of devices to be available at launch. They will arrive later in 2018 if demand for ARM64-based Windows devices will be high enough.