Qualcomm says it can beat Apple’s M1 chip on Windows PCs
TL; DR
- Qualcomm’s new CEO boasted that his company can bring the performance and energy efficiency of Apple’s M1 chip to Windows laptops and PCs.
- He says this will be possible thanks to a recent acquisition of a company staffed with former Apple chip architects.
- He also says the company won’t rely on arm designs, but instead will develop new ones.
At the end of 2020, Apple announced its biggest PC news in years: the M1 chip. Based on the ARM architecture, the M1 offers speeds and energy efficiency that no other company can currently compete with – including heavyweights like Intel and Qualcomm.
Qualcomm’s new CEO Cristiano Amon is ready to change that. In fact, he’s confident that Qualcomm can not only meet Apple’s standards, but raise them even higher. This would mean we could see M1 speeds on Windows laptops and PCs with Qualcomm chips.
Qualcomm M1 speeds on Windows? How?
Amon is a fresh face to Qualcomm, so it makes sense for him to make some big, splashy promises. But he also has plans in the works on how to achieve this goal (via Reuters). Instead of waiting for Arm to come up with a chip that would beat the M1, Qualcomm has already hired a team of former Apple engineers to do it first.
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“We needed the leading performance in a battery-powered device,” said Amon. “If Arm, with whom we have been working for years, develops a CPU that is better than what we can build ourselves, then we always have the option of licensing von Arm.”
Qualcomm got these Apple engineers through an acquisition (an acquisition primarily for employees, not products) of a company called Nuvia. The engineers worked on the development of Apple’s M1 chip before starting Nuvia. Qualcomm plans to start selling chips based on Nuvia designs as early as 2022.
