Early reviews of the Apple Silicon chips in the new MacBook Air M1, MacBook Pro M1, and Mac mini are glowing, and it appears that Apple is not the only company adopting ARM-based chips, according to sources at Bloomberg, Microsoft is also currently exploring the possibility of manufacturing its own chips, which could leave Intel out in the cold.

The report emphasizes that the main focus of the new chips will be for servers powering the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, but one of the site's sources added that this "could lead to a first-party ARM chip for Surface products He added that this "could lead to a first-party ARM chip for Surface products. This chip is referred to as "another chip" earlier in this article, and it does not appear to be an all-purpose processor.

As expected, Microsoft did not confirm the project's existence when asked for comment. Microsoft's Frank Shaw said, "Silicon is a fundamental building block of technology, so we continue to invest in our own capabilities in areas like design, manufacturing, and tools, while fostering and strengthening partnerships with a wide range of chip providers."

Despite the mention of third-party partnerships, this is undeniably bad news for Intel, which currently provides the majority of processors for its Azure cloud service and chips for most of its Surface series (Microsoft last year, announced the Ryzen-powered Surface Laptop 3).

An ARM-powered Surface could happen in two ways. On the one hand, Apple's new M1 MacBook surprises, offering great power and strong battery life over older Intel models. Benchmarks indicate that Windows 10 performs well on Apple's hardware, but due to licensing issues, there is currently no easy way for consumers to see for themselves.

Apple's Surface Pro X is powered by an ARM chip called SQ2, co-developed by Microsoft and Qualcomm, but its performance and battery life lag far behind the latest laptops with Apple silicon. Therefore, it may be time for Microsoft to take matters into its own hands.