Malcolm Owen
Qualcomm has Apple Silicon in its sights, with the mobile chip producer producing ARM-based PC processors that it hopes can compete with Apple's M-series lineup.
Apple has received praise for its debut Mac chip lineup, including the M1 and the newly launched M1 Pro and M1 Max. However, Qualcomm intends to take on Apple in the market, with a major push to launch a new range of ARM-based system-on-chips aimed at notebooks and desktops.
Announced during Qualcomm's investor day, the company says it is working on its "Next-generation CPU." In an image of the presentation shared by Sascha Segan, the chips will be ARM-compatible CPUs that will offer an "M-series competitive solution for the PC."
Qualcomm just promised an Apple M series competitor PC chipset in "nine months" or so. Acknowledge they have weakness in CPU and are using Nuvia acquisition to fix that. #qualcomm pic.twitter.com/CdBsHhKQKr
— Sascha Segan (@saschasegan) November 16, 2021
The chips will be designed by the Nuvia team, a design firm founded by former Apple staff that Qualcomm acquired for $1.4 billion in January. The trio who formed Nuvia previously worked on teams involved with Apple's A-series chip designs.
Hints of the plan surfaced in a July interview, when Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the company needed to produce its own silicon if its customers want to take on Apple directly.
Qualcomm says the new chips will provide high levels of performance and battery life, echoing the benefits of Apple's M1 range. As well as for PCs, the chip design will also be modified to work in mobile devices, vehicles, and for use in data centers.
The company's chief technology officer, Dr. James Thompson, intends for hardware samples to be shipped to device vendors in nine months, with the first devices using the chips being sold to consumers in 2023.
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57 Comments
Late to the party.
At this point, it's entirely up to Apple if they want to maintain a lead or merely compete with the likes of Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm.
9 months is a long time and in theory Apple has had its M2 (or whatever - the next gen M-series chip) in the pipeline for a while now, so we should see products based on it by it then - and possibly see products based on the equivalent of an M2 Max by then as well. Plus, as Qualcomm doesn't make their own products, there will most likely be a delay between the 9 months date and the date that consumers actually have a product in hand using those CPUs.
That is the interesting thing about predictions. You're either basing your predictions on competitors' current gen stuff - which will be outdated by the time your product comes to market - or you're making assumptions about your competitors' next gen product. The problem with that is that Apple isn't like Intel. It offers no roadmap of its CPUs ahead of time. So Qualcomm is either guessing or they're setting their sites WAY too low.
Either way, seems like an interesting promise they're making.
Apple is the kick in the -ss that other companies need to do better. It happened with the iPhone and the cell phone industry too. But they never admit it: they just change their roadmap and claim that it was an obvious move or that it was because the technology wasn't there to do it before. Reactive instead of proactive.