ARM vs x86 For Thin Clients: Why Enterprises Still Bet on the Old Guard
December 12, 2025
Thin clients don’t make headlines. They don’t need to. They quietly support secure desktops in banks, hospitals, call centers, manufacturing floors, and government offices worldwide. Their job isn’t to impress, it’s to last. To stay locked down. To work every day without surprises.
That’s why, despite the surge of interest in ARM processors across laptops and servers, many enterprise IT teams still pause when the conversation turns to ARM-based thin clients.
If ARM chips are more efficient and modern, why hasn’t the thin client market followed the same trajectory?
The answer sits at the intersection of risk, ecosystem maturity, and long-term operational reality.
The Uncomfortable Truth: x86 Is an Ecosystem, Not Just a Processor
When most people think of x86, they think Intel or AMD silicon. In enterprise thin clients, that view misses the bigger picture. x86 isn’t just a chip architecture; it’s an ecosystem that’s been hardened by decades of deployment.
What does that look like in practice?
First, drivers. Astute card readers, badge scanners, specialty medical displays, and serial devices that should have been retired ten years ago but still run critical workflows. On Linux, x86 drivers arrive first, work better, and stay supported longer. That matters when a single missing driver can derail an entire rollout.
Then there’s VDI client maturity. Citrix Workspace, VMware (now Omnissa) Horizon, Microsoft AVD, and Windows 365 clients are deeply optimized for x86 Linux. Features land there first. Performance tuning happens there first. When something breaks, that’s where vendors focus their fixes.
Standards play a role, too. BIOS and UEFI behavior, firmware tooling, chipset expectations, and hardware certification processes are all predictable on x86. OEMs can design once and deploy globally without unpleasant surprises.
Put it all together, and you get something IT teams value more than benchmarks: confidence. An x86 thin client shows up, works on day one, and keeps working for six, eight, sometimes ten years. In environments measured by support tickets per seat, that reliability is hard to beat.
ARM’s Appeal, and the Part Nobody Likes to Talk About
On paper, ARM looks perfect for thin clients. Low power draw. Minimal heat. Fanless designs. Apple proved that ARM can outperform legacy Intel systems in laptops, so why not here?
What often gets overlooked is how ARM actually gets to market.
ARM doesn’t sell finished platforms. It licenses designs. Each chip vendor then fills in the blanks: firmware, GPU drivers, Wi-Fi stacks, power management, and OS tuning. The result is not one ARM PC platform, but many slightly different ones. ARM’s official architecture overview explains how this ecosystem works and why implementations vary.
For a thin client OS vendor, that creates real headaches.
Instead of targeting a single, well-understood baseline, they’re dealing with a patchwork of SoCs, each with its own quirks. One GPU behaves differently from another. Wi-Fi support varies. Power management isn’t consistent. Peripheral compatibility becomes a moving target.
Now layer enterprise VDI on top of that. ARM builds of VDI clients often lag behind x86 in features or optimizations. Multimedia redirection, Teams offload, USB handling, these details matter in production, and they’re usually more mature on x86.
For a market with tight margins and customers who expect devices to “just work,” that’s a tough sell.
Why Apple’s ARM Success Is the Exception, Not the Rule
Apple made its transition to ARM look almost effortless. But that smoothness came at a massive cost.
Apple rebuilt macOS for Apple Silicon from the ground up. It created Rosetta 2 to seamlessly translate Intel applications. Developers were given early hardware and clear timelines. Drivers, system extensions, and kernel components were all redesigned under Apple’s control.
Crucially, Apple owns the whole stack: hardware, OS, developer tools, distribution. Thin client vendors don’t.
Most rely on Linux distributions tailored for VDI. They depend on third-party client software from Citrix, VMware, or Microsoft. They don’t control the application ecosystem, nor do they have the leverage to force rapid ARM adoption across it.
That difference in scale and control explains a lot.
Why Linux Thin Client Vendors Keep Choosing x86
If you look at long-standing thin client platforms, especially those built around Linux, a pattern emerges. They stick with x86, not because ARM is uninteresting, but because x86 is dependable.
Peripheral support is already certified and proven in the field. VDI clients are feature-complete and well-tested. Quality assurance remains manageable because there’s a single primary hardware baseline rather than dozens of ARM variants.
And perhaps most importantly, enterprise customers demand predictability. When you’re deploying thousands of endpoints for tellers, nurses, or call center agents, surprises are expensive. Stability beats novelty every time.
In those environments, shaving a few watts off power consumption doesn’t outweigh the risk of driver gaps or missing features.
That same thinking applies to broader endpoint strategy decisions, especially when comparing thin clients and traditional PCs. We’ve broken that cost and lifecycle discussion down in detail in PCs vs Thin Clients: Cost, Energy Savings & Lifespan Compared.
The Real Trade-Off IT Leaders Are Making
When you strip away the marketing, the choice looks something like this:
x86 thin clients are ready today. They’re widely supported, predictable, and backed by a mature VDI software stack. Support costs are known quantities.
ARM thin clients are appealing on paper. They promise efficiency and potentially lower hardware costs. But they also require significant software investment and carry the risk of uneven support.
Until ARM platforms offer a truly standardized, enterprise-ready foundation, most IT leaders will continue to choose the safer option.
So What's The Take?
ARM has reshaped phones, tablets, and laptops. Thin clients are a different beast.
Here, success isn’t measured by architectural elegance or peak benchmarks. Uptime, support tickets measure it, and how quietly endpoints fade into the background of daily operations.
Until ARM platforms converge on a truly enterprise-ready baseline, x86 will continue powering thin clients worldwide, not because it’s exciting, but because it works.
Still weighing ARM vs x86 for your environment?
Every deployment has its own edge cases, legacy constraints, and risk tolerance. If you want a second opinion or need to double-check an endpoint strategy before committing, we’re happy to talk it through. Schedule a short strategy session with ThinClient Direct.
