For years, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon chips for Windows PCs, and for years, those chips’ performance have failed to dislodge Intel’s or AMD’s chips to any significant degree. Its latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (and the closely related Microsoft SQ3) appears in just two consumer PCs, the cumbersomely named Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with 5G and Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13s Gen 1.
But that may be changing. Nearly three years ago, Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was mainly working on server processors, but the company’s founders and many of its employees had also been involved in developing the A- and M-series Apple Silicon processors that have all enabled the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to achieve their enviable blend of performance and battery life. Today, Qualcomm is formally announcing the fruit of the Nuvia acquisition: the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core, 4 nm chip that will compete directly with Intel’s Core processors and AMD Ryzen chips in PCs—and, less directly, Apple’s M2 and M3-series processors for Macs.
We’ve heard a lot of these claims over the years, and to be honest, I’m a little tired of promises. Show me the goods.
Apple did.
I think the hardest thing for Qualcomm is going to be getting those into actual consumers’ hands. Apple was in the enviable position of being able to move its laptop buyers en masse to Apple Silicon in a way that no other Windows Laptop vendor, expert for maybe Microsoft (with their Surface line), can.
However, Microsoft is also competing with the likes of Lenovo, Dell and HP for enterprise cash, and that is the sort of thing that makes companies conservative.
mkone,
Indeed, it’s not enough to ship working devices. Consumers actually need to buy it.
The problem with this is that the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is hobbled by this: “the Windows world’s answer to Apple Silicon”.
Windows creates certain expectations. One of them is extreme backwards compatibility. “What do you mean this laptop with Snapdragon X Elite can’t run Auntie Oonie’s Birthday Card Maker from 1997?!” “Why can’t I use my scanner (with x86 driver) from 2008 on this machine?” So that shiny new chip becomes a second grade Windows experience.
For this to fly Qualcomm needs to create a unique niche for these chips. Neither Windows, Android/ChromeOS or regular Linux will do here. It needs a dedicated OS with clear advantages over the competition. Clean environment with intuitive UX. Energy efficient and with long battery life. A suite of well integrated applications for personal data management and media consumption. Long-term software support. Easy SDK to stir interest from outside developers. Preferably FOSS, but hey, sometimes we can’t have it all.
I think Qualcomm could pull this off. Make a reference platform of sleek and easy to use devices. License these designs out to OEMs. Furnish them all with Qualcomm’s take on the operating system. Call it Qualcomm Personal Computing Experience, PCX for short. Make sure it it doesn’t have the shenanigans the other platforms are plagued by. Use the platform to drive hardware sales.
Bar that, Qualcomm just produced the next chip that can’t.
r_a_trip,
You aren’t wrong that backwards compatibility has been a strong point for windows (relative to competitors). However I find your examples ironic. I’ve had to dispose of several multifunction printers and scanners on account of them no longer working with new versions of windows.
I think you’ve already identified a niche that needs filling, but it would go against everything Qualcomm historically stands for: fully open source ARM hardware! There’s decades of pent up demand. Just imagine qualcomm being the one to deliver the solution after being the problem for so long, haha.
I imagine it could do well in data centers regardless of whether windows consumer devices flop or succeed.
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