Shortly after Apple lifted the veil on its M2 chip, the CEO of Qualcomm has already announced that his company would be on the verge of unveiling even more efficient processors, thanks in particular to the know-how of Nuvia.
Apple announced a new powerful M2 chip a few days ago that is ridiculing the competition at its WWDC 2022 conference. However, the performance announced by Apple did not really surprise its competitor Qualcomm. Indeed, Cristiano Amon, chief executive of Qualcomm, told Reuters on Thursday thathe thought his company could have the best chip on the market.
This is not the first time that Qualcomm has made such a statement, since the company had already announced last year that its chips will soon be able to bury those of Apple on laptops. Currently, this is far from the case, since the M1 chip crushed the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 of ARM PCs, but this may soon change thanks to the expertise of Nuvia engineers.
Nuvia could help Qualcomm design the best chips on the market
To overtake Apple in terms of performance, Qualcomm relies in particular on the expertise of a team of chip architects who previously worked on Apple’s chip and who now work at Nuvia, a new company acquired last year by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion.
In the ranks of Nuvia, we find in particular ex-Apple CPU design chief Gerard Williams, who founded the company in early 2019. The latter worked on the company’s Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane, Monsoon, and Vortex CPU architectures for various Apple A-series SoCs. Nuvia was also co-founded by John Bruno, who was a system architect at Google before spending five years at Apple in a similar function, and the two engineers were later joined by Manu Gulati, another former Google and Apple employee and lead architect of Apple’s mobile SoCs. Nuvia also has other engineers who have worked at AMD and Intel.
With such a team, it is not surprising to see Qualcomm announce that they can beat M2 chips in the future. Although Apple’s processors are overpowered, they are far from benefiting from the latest technologies on the market. In effect, the M1 chip was based on the A14 chip of the iPhone 12, while the Apple M2 is based on the A15 chip. Both benefit from 5 nm engraving, and are based on an 8th generation ARM architecture.
However, newer Qualcomm chips already use finer 4nm etching and ARM v9 architecture. It will be a few more years before we see the first custom chips from Nuvia for laptops, but these could well revolutionize the market.
Source : Reuters
