Qualcomm recently announced that it will produce its first ever Nuvia-based laptop processor next year, but did not provide any exact date. The news comes just a few days after the company announced its Snapdragon 888+ SoC that comes with higher clocks and an improved machine learning performance.
Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Nuvia back in March this year, after it purchased the CPU and technology design company for around US$1.4 billion (~RM5.83 billion). In an interview with Reuters, Cristiano Amon, the new CEO of Qualcomm, said that his company is aiming for the new Nuvia-based chip to go up against the likes of Apple’s M1 chipset.
It should come as no surprise that this isn’t Qualcomm’s first foray with designing and fabricating laptop-focused processors. Prior to its acquisition of Nuvia, the chipmaker first entered the laptop space with the Snapdragon 8cx, back in 2018. The following year, Microsoft announced its Surface Pro X laptop powered by the SQ1 chip, which is technically a tweaked variation of the Snapdragon 8cx.
While there still isn’t any tangible data, online speculation is suggesting that, for Amon’s goals of his Nuvia-based SoC to be achieved, the new laptop chip would have to have approximately 40% more Instructions per clock (IPC) than an Intel 10th Core CPU or an AMD Zen 2 generation CPU. Moreover, the CPU would also need to match the battery performance of the M1 SoC.
That being said, Qualcomm also did say that it will continue to nurture its ongoing relationship with ARM and that, should an ARM design turn out to be more efficient than its own, it will have no qualms about using said design.
