Qualcomm bought a chip manufacturing startup called Nuvia in March 2021, and later that year the company said it would use Nuvia’s talent and technology to create custom-designed, high-performance ARM chips to compete with Apple’s processors. But if you’re waiting for a truly high-end Windows PC with something other than Intel or AMD chips, you’ll still have to wait a bit. Qualcomm CEO Christian Amon mentioned during the company’s latest earnings call that its high-performance chips should hit consumer devices “at the end of 2023.”
Qualcomm still plans to provide chip samples to its partners later in 2022, a timeline it mentioned earlier and managed to meet. The gap between sampling and mass production is typical, giving Qualcomm time to fix bugs and improve chip performance, and PC makers more time to design and build finished products that include the chips.
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in part because of its staff — the company was founded by former members of Apple’s chip design team — and in part because of its work designing ARM-based server chips. It takes years to bring a chip design to market, so even if Nuvia was already working on chips aimed at consumer laptops when it was purchased, it always had to be at least a couple of years before we could actually buy them in anything..
Like Apple processors, Nuvia supports the ARM instruction set but does not use off-the-shelf ARM Cortex CPU designs. These processor cores have proven phenomenally successful in the mainstream SoCs that run everything from Android phones to smart TVs, and have helped popularize the practice of combining large, high-performance CPU cores and small, high-performance CPU cores in the same design. But they rarely top the performance charts, especially when they run x86 code on Windows with performance degradation.
If Nuvia chips can match or surpass the performance of the M1 at the end of 2023, that would still be an impressive improvement over current generation Snapdragon chips. By then, Apple may be a generation or two older than the M1, but Qualcomm will have the advantage of competing more directly with Intel and AMD rather than Apple. Keeping up with Apple’s performance can be difficult, but outperforming x86 chips in power efficiency may be a more achievable goal.