Apple has showed that the chips that power its iPhones are also powerful enough to power the company Mac lineup, and it has taken things a step further with the Worldwide Developers Conference debut of its second-generation M2 chip, which powers the newly redesigned MacBook Air. The excitement over mobile chips powering computers is music to Qualcomm ears, as the company is looking to make its own waves with a next-generation mobile-based chipset it's developing for performance laptops.
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"We want to be the performance leader in PC on the CPU, period," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said last week in an interview.
The only catch is that you won't be able to buy one of these super-fast processors until the end of 2023.
Qualcomm, best known for producing chips for high-end smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S22 family, has actually been supplying mobile-based processors – under the Snapdragon brand – for much longer than Apple. Microsoft Surface Pro X, for example, was released nearly a year before the first M1 computers.
However, the company has high hopes for chips developed as part of its acquisition of Nuvia, which specialised in high-performance chips based on the Arm architecture, which powers everything from smartphones to iPads. Amon stated that the Nuvia chips will differentiate themselves from the company existing Snapdragon processors by focusing on high-performance computations powering CPUs, GPUs, and neural processing for artificial intelligence.
Amon, who took over as Qualcomm CEO a year ago this month, met with me to discuss Nuvia, the future of augmented reality and the metaverse, the economy, and dealing with supply chain constraints.
PC market is an elusive market
Qualcomm has been supplying Snapdragon processors to PCs for years, but they have rarely made an impact in the market. Early versions felt underpowered and couldn't run key applications that required the x86 architecture and Intel processors.
However, Apple displayed that mobile processors can not only function as computer brains, but also as a key selling point. Amon expressed gratitude to Apple for driving the development of ARM-compatible programmes, but added that Microsoft is also on this journey.
"The timing is now because a perfect alignment of stars was required," he explained.
According to Amon, the trend of more people working remotely has changed the requirements for laptops. Connectivity anywhere, more powerful cameras and videoconferencing, and quick, always-on capabilities have all suddenly become priorities. That, he claims, is compatible with Snapdragon key characteristics.
He counting on Nuvia to give him an advantage. Qualcomm acquired the startup last year, which was founded by chip veterans with prior experience at Google, Arm, and, yes, Apple.
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