Qualcomm runs behind Apple

Qualcomm, San Diego, Californie. © iStock.

A little over a year ago, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, a California chip manufacturing startup created by former members of Apple’s chip design team. The company then announced that it would use Nuvia talent and technology to produce custom high-performance ARM chips to compete with Apple processors. But it will take a little more time to get to a truly powerful Windows PC equipped with a chip by a company other than Intel or AMD. Christian Amon, Qualcomm CEO, mentioned in his latest earnings call that the high-performance chips wouldn’t find their way into consumer devices until the end of 2023. Qualcomm does still plan to provide sample chips to its partners in 2022.

If Nuvia’s upcoming chips can indeed equal or surpass the M1’s performance by late 2023, it will be a significant improvement over current generation Snapdragon chips, even if Apple is still in the lead. Apple, it seems, is currently working on M3, a third generation M chip using TSMC’s 3 nanometer process, which should appear on Macs in 2023.

⇨ Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham, “Qualcomm’s M1-class laptop chips will be ready for PCs in ‘late 2023’.”

2022-04-28