Qualcomm’s response to Apple’s silicon will be available in devices by the end of 2023, the company’s CEO said earlier this week (via Toms hardware).
Last November, Qualcomm announced plans to build the next-generation Arm-based System on Chips (SoCs), designed to compete with Apple’s M-Series chips, for the PC market. The chips are “designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs” and are developed by the Nuvia team. Qualcomm said it will compete directly with Apple’s M-Series chips, including the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max, and hopes to lead the industry for “sustained performance and battery life.”
During the company’s latest earnings call earlier this week, Qualcomm’s President and CEO Christian Amon said the Nuvia team was making progress toward its goal of developing a significant leap forward for Arm processors. Amon added that the first Nuvia-designed processor will “go after the performance level” and that Nuvia-powered Windows laptops are about to be available to customers by the end of 2023.
The timing appears to indicate a slight delay compared to the original 2023 time frame set by Qualcomm last year. The company previously said that sample Nuvia chips would be available to device manufacturers in August 2022, but now expectations have been extended to the second half of 2022, with particular emphasis on the debut of the first Nuvia consumer devices in “late” 2023 .
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, a chip-startup company founded by former Apple chip designers, for $ 1.4 billion in January 2021. Former Apple engineers wanted to create Arm-based SoCs specifically for servers and target the ever-connected PC market (ACPC) with a chip that could compete with M1, but now the team’s goal seems to have been significantly expanded.
By the end of 2023, Apple is expected to be well underway with its M2 series of chips. The company may have even introduced the first M3 chips as the first Nuvia chips hit the market.