Qualcomm may be a smartphone leader, but it’s been an also-ran in PCs for years now. While the chipset company has struggled to get its chips into Windows machines, Apple’s M1 chip, based on a similar ARM instruction set, recently took the market by storm.
At Qualcomm’s investor day today, the company finally approached the challenge head-on. Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia, a startup founded by some of the folks who helped develop Apple’s A-series processors, will let the company reveal a new PC-focused chipset in “nine months, or something like that,” Qualcomm CTO JamesThompson says.
For several years, Qualcomm has focused on “heterogeneous computing” rather than building fast, custom CPU cores. Custom AI processors, image signal processors, and radio systems have helped Qualcomm maintain its leadership in smartphones and VR sets, with Qualcomm revealing more than 10 million units of Meta’s new Oculus Quest 2 have already been sold.
PCs, though, are still a CPU-centric space, and the series of chips that Qualcomm has provided to PC manufacturers over the past few years—the 7c, 8c, and 8cx—haven’t given PC makers a compelling reason to switch from Intel.
Qualcomm chips have so far appeared primarily in Chromebooks and in low-end Windows laptops, such as the new Samsung Galaxy Book Go. That’s a far cry from the hyper-powered new 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro.
“Our objective is to have the highest-performing, lowest-power CPU,” Thompson says. “If you think about our … technology roadmap, that was the one weakness I felt we had for quite a while.” Chips from the Nuvia team will change Qualcomm’s course on that, he says.
GPU is also important, of course. “In graphics, we have the ability to extend our graphics all the way up to desktop-gaming-class graphics. Right now you’ve only seen that in the smartphone, but you will see that in the PC as well,” Thompson says.
You could say Apple’s M1 is a template for this, but Qualcomm has been rolling out PC chipsets for longer than Apple has; it just hasn’t succeeded in winning either sales or mind share. “We believe the future of PCs are going to be a fully integrated [system-on-chip], Thompson says.
Qualcomm has a major event in two weeks, the Snapdragon Summit, at which it’s anticipated to announce its next-generation Snapdragon mobile chips. But it sounds like we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see Qualcomm’s answer to Apple’s M1—or, at that point, the M2.
