Qualcomm's M2-beating chip probably won't arrive until after M3 drops

After missing a commitment to trounce Apple in 2022, it will also miss its 2023 promise, as Qualcomm is now promising its Apple Silicon-beating processors will ship in 2024.

Speaking at Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm CEO and President Cristiano Amon yesterday revealed that Apple will be producing its own 5G modems in the iPhone 16. Today in more from his interview with the Wall Street Journal's Joanne Stern, Amon said the company was looking to match Apple's annovation.

"Absolutely," he said. "We design... you know, we have not yet announced... but our SoC and custom CPUs, you should think of it as an Apple compete for the Microsoft ecosystem."

Windows PCs that compete with Apple M2-powered Macs? Here's Qualcomm's @cristianoamon at my #MWC2023 @WSJ Tech Things event talking about how the company's next chip for PCs is going to compete with Apple. Only problem? It's not shipping in products until early 2024. pic.twitter.com/84g6HZ0jtb
— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) February 27, 2023

When Stern asked when this chip was coming, Amon initially said "September, October timeframe."

However when she pressed, he revealed that was not when products would be shipping.

"We probably will see some devices that may get announced in '23," he continued. "Most likely you're going to see a number of announcements at CES in 2024."

Amon's comments at this year's MWC appear to back up his claims from April 2022, that Qualcomm would be shipping PCs by late 2023. However, that estimate followed a previous one that saw Qualcomm expecting to release chips around August 2022.

At the time it made that announcement, in November 2021, Qualcomm was talking about creating a competitor to what was then Apple's M1 series of processors. Apple has since released the M2 range, and various rumors say it will have an M3 in a Mac by the end of 2023.

23 Comments

DuhSesame 8 Years · 1270 comments

About 1 year ago

So where did he promise their chip will “beat” the M2?

red oak 13 Years · 1104 comments

So, it will launch against Apple’s M3, which is rumored to bring monster gains in performance and battery. Good luck with that

Also, where are Microsoft developers in creating ARM natively compiled software? That will add another 12 months to their timeline in getting fully baked solution in the marketplace

red oak said:

So, it will launch against Apple’s M3, which is rumored to bring monster gains in performance and battery. Good luck with that

Also, where are Microsoft developers in creating ARM natively compiled software? That will add another 12 months to their timeline in getting fully baked solution in the marketplace

The M3 will likely based on A16, still a 4+4 with mild clock increase.

That said, I doubt Qualcomm will put out something better overall, we’ll see.

DuhSesame said:

red oak said:

So, it will launch against Apple’s M3, which is rumored to bring monster gains in performance and battery. Good luck with that

Also, where are Microsoft developers in creating ARM natively compiled software? That will add another 12 months to their timeline in getting fully baked solution in the marketplace

The M3 will likely based on A16, still a 4+4 with mild clock increase.

That said, I doubt Qualcomm will put out something better overall, we’ll see.

That would be three generations based on the A16. We’ll see

The move alone to 3 nm is going to provide 30% benefit. Apple gets to decide how to divy that up between performance and battery life.

I would not be surprised if M3 provides 30% performance overall (CPU and GPU) AND 10% better battery life. 10% sounds low, but that’s another 2 hours at this point. Substantial. Or, Apple could decide to put it all into performance and get 40% better vs. M2. That would be a real monster

DAalseth 6 Years · 3067 comments

On one hand even though I’d not want to go to Android, I’m glad that they are putting pressure on Apple to keep their SoC advancing.
On the other hand, the chips are so much faster than I need that it’s rather meaningless. I mean I haven’t felt like my computer/device wasn’t fast enough for a long time. When I upgrade I look to see if I can double the benchmark of my previous system, I keep them a long time, but mostly that’s for fun. In reality even if Apple’s M Series chips fell behind QC it wouldn’t actually make a tinker’s damn bit of difference to me.