Qualcomm revealed plans to bring to the market an Apple M1-beating chip by 2023 during its 2021 investor conference.
The processor will be based on technology from Nuvia, a chip startup that was founded by ex-Apple engineers who had worked on Apple A and M series chips and was bought by Qualcomm earlier this year. We can hope to see Nuvia’s tech in smartphone chips too at some point in the future.
For now, the focus is on the next generation of Arm-based processors which Qualcomm claims will set a new performance benchmark for Windows PCs. The chip will offer industry-leading sustained performance and battery life, or so Qualcomm hopes. It will feature Arm-based CPU cores, Adreno graphics, 5G modem, Hexagon DSPs, and Spectra imaging core.
If you look at what Apple has done with the M-series, on the upper hand it even has the performance of an [Nvidia] RTX 3080 at discrete graphics.” – Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.
Qualcomm will also work on improving its Adreno GPUs to offer a desktop-like gaming experience on PCs. The chip giant is aiming to have samples out for customers in around nine months, with the official launch planned for 2023.
Whether the chip will be able to live up to the claims or see the same fate as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx and Microsoft Surface SQ2 PC chips that failed to make a mark remains to be seen.
Apple meanwhile has already launched even more powerful versions of the M1 chip, the M1 Pro and M1 Max, and is now reportedly working on the third-generation of Mac chips that will likely offer significantly better CPU performance than the latest chips. The M series chip power a slate of new Apple products, including some of the best tablets that money can buy.