We have known that Vole has been developing its silicon for a while now, but all it took was a news-starved bank holiday and a job notice to wake up the Tame Apple Press to the threat.

Not only are there job listings that suggest the company is building its Silicon-based ARM chips for client devices, one TAPs hack was shocked to discover that Microsoft is daring to optimise Windows 12 for Silicon-ARM architecture.

The jobs were for custom silicon accelerators, System on Chips (SoCs), and high-performance, and high-bandwidth designs, all of which have been widely reported over the last few years.

“These job listings strongly indicate that Microsoft is actively investing in developing its own ARM chips, aiming to challenge Apple’s dominance in the market,” wailed one TAPs hack, tearing his hair and ripping up his rabbit.

For all that Apple believes that it invented the ARM chip, Microsoft has had several goes at trying to get Windows on ARM working. It had limited success, mainly because no one wanted it because it did not work very well and partly because Vole was closer to Intel, and ARM chips interfered with that relationship.