Apple Silicon competitor: Qualcomm's 8cx Gen 4 based on Nuvia design

[senttoschool]

For those who don't know, Nuvia was a startup created by ex-Apple Silicon leaders, including the Chief Architect. They wanted to build a server CPU at Apple but management didn't give the green light. So they left and formed Nuvia. Qualcomm bought Nuvia for $1.4B and directed the team to focus on a laptop chip instead.

Given that the Nuvia team basically created Apple's plans for the M chips, it's not a surprise that their first SoC is very similar to the M2 Pro: 8 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores for the CPU. The rest of the SoC is filled with Qualcomm tech including an Adreno GPU and a Hexagon Tensor NPU. It will be released in 2024, which should go up against 3nm M3.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1616575097761849345

 

[senttoschool]

There are a lot of high stakes in this chip.

If Qualcomm and Nuvia are successful, they will allow Windows computers to compete with Apple Silicon in performance per watt, something that AMD and Intel might never be able to do with x86. Microsoft is putting a ton of effort into Windows ARM. This chip is crucial to Microsoft because Windows laptops are losing market share to Macs.

For ARM, the company, it's high stakes because Qualcomm plans to bring Nuvia designs to their phone SoCs next. This means ARM designs will have to compete with Nuvia designs. Currently, Qualcomm's Snapdragon simply uses ARM stock core designs such as the Cortex-X3. Thus far, ARM designs have failed to catch up to A-series chips. If Qualcomm's Nuvia designs can beat stock ARM designs, ARM will not only lose a huge paying customer in Qualcomm for core designs, their other customers such as Mediatek will lose market share to Qualcomm. This is one major reason why Qualcomm lobbied UK & US governments against Nvidia to acquire ARM - Nvidia would have made ARM designs more competitive against Nuvia and Snapdragon.

• Apple sued Nuvia's founder: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-nuvia-lawsuit-idUSKBN1ZK16R
• ARM is also suing to prevent Qualcomm from launching Nuvia designs: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/arm-sues-qualcomm-over-its-1-4-billion-nuvia-acquisition/

 

[Xiao_Xi]

What should we do to not split the conversation?

There are some interesting posts in the "Qualcomm Nuvia vs Apple Mx" and "Arm Files Lawsuit Against Qualcomm and Nuvia" threads on this topic. Should we copy/quote the relevant posts from those threads and continue the discussion here or continue the discussion in the other threads?

 

[maflynn]

If Qualcomm and Nuvia are successful, they will allow Windows computers to compete with Apple Silicon in performance per watt, something that AMD and Intel might never be able to do with x86. Microsoft is putting a ton of effort into Windows ARM. This chip is crucial to Microsoft because Windows laptops are losing market share to Macs.

I'm of the opinion that peformance per watt is an over-stated metric. Its useful, yes but Apple leans heavily on that measurement an I don't think its something that the consumers by and large care too much about. They care about battery life (which performance per watt impacts), I could be wrong but there are classes of windows machines that offer close or similar battery life.

Where Apple excels at, and where ARM Windows fails it X86 emulation. Apple hit it out of the park with high performance and high compatibility in X86 emulation. Arm Windows has not. I've had to deal with programs not running or running poorly - very poorly.

Until MSFT Fixes ARM windows, it won't matter what ARM processors they use, and while I love the idea of competition and see some impressive rumors with Nuvia I don't think PC sector will be able to compete with Apple on that front.

 

[senttoschool]

I'm of the opinion that peformance per watt is an over-stated metric. Its useful, yes but Apple leans heavily on that measurement an I don't think its something that the consumers by and large care too much about. They care about battery life (which performance per watt impacts), I could be wrong but there are classes of windows machines that offer close or similar battery life.

Consumers care about battery life, laptop temperature, laptop noise, speed, size of laptop, weight of laptop. All of these things are impacted by performance per watt.

Of course, we can make it more obvious by stating something like "performance per watt with a minimum acceptable speed for the application or platform". But I think people generally understand what performance per watt leads to.

Where Apple excels at, and where ARM Windows fails it X86 emulation. Apple hit it out of the park with high performance and high compatibility in X86 emulation. Arm Windows has not. I've had to deal with programs not running or running poorly - very poorly.

It's chicken and egg. It doesn't matter how great Windows on ARM is if non-Apple Silicon ARM chips suck. They certainly suck right now.

Windows on ARM will slowly improve to the point where it will be good to great.

 

[maflynn]

Consumers care about battery life, laptop temperature, laptop noise, speed, size of laptop, weight of laptop. All of these things are impacted by performance per watt.

Yes, but most non-gaming laptops are not hot, loud or thick (they're not as quiet as Macs, don't get me wrong). My point is comparing apples to apples, performance per watt is not the game changer that apple says it is - at least in most consumers minds, that's my opinion of course.

It's chicken and egg. It doesn't matter how great Windows on ARM

I don't see it as a chicken and egg thing, simply because MS has access to decent (not great) ARM processors and have been working on ARM windows since before 2017 - 6+ years ago and its simply not good. It cannot hold a candle to what Apple did with macOS.

 

[Digitalguy]

There is a huge difference between Apple Silicon and PCs running Windows on Arm and this difference is not going away anytime soon, if ever: there is no transition from x86 to ARM.
The incentive for software houses to make an ARM version of their software are infinitely smaller and that's why there are very few native apps outside those from Microsoft. And some crucial apps don't even run at all, like Dropbox.
While Rosetta is clearly better than WoA emulation, even if Microsoft manages to improve that, Rosetta will be gone at some point, probably in a couple of years, and virtually everything will be native by then, while virtually everything will still be emulated on WoA. That's not going to change because there will be no transition.
Currently there is around a 30% penalty from emulation and I high doubt this will improve to a point where emulation is virtually as good as native. And emulation also impacts battery life, not just performance. So Windows on ARM PCs will always be handicapped vs Apple Silicon Macs.
This does not mean WoA is bound to fail, but that it's bound to coexist with Intel and AMD x86 Windows, which will continue to dominate the PC market, while WoA will mainly be used in some smaller or special form factor devices, but I don't see it becoming mainstrean in this decade if ever...

 

[senttoschool]

Yes, but most non-gaming laptops are not hot, loud or thick (they're not as quiet as Macs, don't get me wrong). My point is comparing apples to apples, performance per watt is not the game changer that apple says it is - at least in most consumers minds, that's my opinion of course.

Most non-gaming laptops are hot, loud, and can be quite thick. Ever used an Intel Macbook? Take any AMD and Intel laptop today. Unplug the power cord. Performance can drop by as much as 50% when unplugged. Plug the power cord back to regain full power. Now the fans are spinning like crazy. That's performance per watt at work.

Performance per watt while having a high overall performance is the main selling point of Apple Silicon. It's the primary reason people are buying Macs more than ever.

I don't see it as a chicken and egg thing, simply because MS has access to decent (not great) ARM processors and have been working on ARM windows since before 2017 - 6+ years ago and its simply not good. It cannot hold a candle to what Apple did with macOS.

These things take time. Before Apple Silicon, Microsoft had very little competitive threat to make Windows on ARM great. Now it does.

Will it ever be as smooth as the Apple Silicon transition? Nope. Windows is fragmented, supports a lot more legacy programs, and supports more hardware makers.

The nice thing is, macOS has done a lot of the work to get developers to create ARM versions of their apps. Microsoft benefits.

But again, to me, it's still chicken and egg. Windows on ARM needs a killer SoC. This killer SoC needs to convincingly beat AMD and Intel at performance per watt and at least match AMD and Intel in pure performance on laptops.

If Microsoft continues to rely on AMD and Intel as CPU suppliers, I think it'll lose a lot of market share in the long run.

 

[maflynn]

Most non-gaming laptops are hot, loud, and can be quite thick

That's not my experience, the Lenovo Yoga is a good example of a thin, light laptop. HP spectre x360 is another thin and light laptop

 

[Digitalguy]

Most non-gaming laptops are hot, loud, and can be quite thick. Ever used an Intel Macbook? Take any AMD and Intel laptop today. Unplug the power cord. Performance can drop by as much as 50% when unplugged. Plug the power cord back to regain full power. Now the fans are spinning like crazy. That's performance per watt at work.

Performance per watt while having a high overall performance is the main selling point of Apple Silicon. It's the primary reason people are buying Macs more than ever.


These things take time. Before Apple Silicon, Microsoft had very little competitive threat to make Windows on ARM great. Now it does.

Will it ever be as smooth as the Apple Silicon transition? Nope. Windows is fragmented, supports a lot more legacy programs, and supports more hardware makers.

The nice thing is, macOS has done a lot of the work to get developers to create ARM versions of their apps. Microsoft benefits.

But again, to me, it's still chicken and egg. Windows on ARM needs a killer SoC. This killer SoC needs to convincingly beat AMD and Intel at performance per watt and at least match AMD and Intel in pure performance on laptops.

If Microsoft continues to rely on AMD and Intel as CPU suppliers, I think it'll lose a lot of market share in the long run.

I don't believe Apple Silicon is enough to take a lot of market share from Windows, not even in the long run.
While Apple Silicon Macs has obvious benefits Windows PCs have also other advatange if you exclude the Apple fan world.... Main one if many more price points, but also larger software support (not just gaming, but a lot of business software is Windows only), many more form factors (much lighter devices, convertible devices, pen support) and options (cellular among them).
In a world where bringing a 27,000mah power bank may double the battery life of a laptop, battery life is nice to have but not that crucial to the point of giving up other advantages.. My 13" Thinkpad X1 nano has cellular and weight so much less than a MacBook that I can still bring a powerbank when I need more battery life and have a similar weight to a Macbook (it still has decent battery life without it and is pretty quiet). Granted I don't do think like video editing, mainly business software and Office work. Cellular for me is a bigger deal than having more battery life (especially as most of the time I don't even need to bring a power bank).
Meanwhile since I rely on Dropbox for my work, I could not even consider Windows on Arm as an option at all, let alone other software compatibility issues like the lack of support for using iPads as a second display for my laptop, something which I do all the time on the go....

 

[bobcomer]

That's not my experience, the Lenovo Yoga is a good example of a thin, light laptop. HP spectre x360 is another thin and light laptop

At work I have a Lenovo X13, love it -- I never hear the fan and it runs cool. And it's lighter than an M2 MBA and pretty thin.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

sounds super exciting, been waiting for this one

8cx gen 2 was hella disappoiting

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

There is a huge difference between Apple Silicon and PCs running Windows on Arm and this difference is not going away anytime soon, if ever: there is no transition from x86 to ARM.
The incentive for software houses to make an ARM version of their software are infinitely smaller and that's why there are very few native apps outside those from Microsoft. And some crucial apps don't even run at all, like Dropbox.
While Rosetta is clearly better than WoA emulation, even if Microsoft manages to improve that, Rosetta will be gone at some point, probably in a couple of years, and virtually everything will be native by then, while virtually everything will still be emulated on WoA. That's not going to change because there will be no transition.
Currently there is around a 30% penalty from emulation and I high doubt this will improve to a point where emulation is virtually as good as native. And emulation also impacts battery life, not just performance. So Windows on ARM PCs will always be handicapped vs Apple Silicon Macs.
This does not mean WoA is bound to fail, but that it's bound to coexist with Intel and AMD x86 Windows, which will continue to dominate the PC market, while WoA will mainly be used in some smaller or special form factor devices, but I don't see it becoming mainstrean in this decade if ever...

why wont windows make native arm ?

 

[MrGunny94]

That's not my experience, the Lenovo Yoga is a good example of a thin, light laptop. HP spectre x360 is another thin and light laptop

Yeah but as everyone knows you loose performance the moment you take it out of the power outlet...

 

[Digitalguy]

why wont windows make native arm ?

First, this question is not well phrased. I guess you meant why software developers for Windows won't make native ARM apps?
The answer is because they have zero incentive, zero.
At this point WoA is a tiny niche very few care about, while on Mac if you don't make a native or binary app you software will be dead once Rosetta is removed from MacOS...
For WoA it's a catch 22 situation with very little hope of becomaing mainstream

 

[maflynn]

Yeah but as everyone knows you loose performance the moment you take it out of the power outlet...

Yes, and that's a huge advantage that apple holds, no question

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Yeah but as everyone knows you loose performance the moment you take it out of the power outlet...

Should be fixed with that new QC chip hopefully

 

[sam_dean]

Any competition is good.

This will improve Windows 11 on ARM and provide actual competition to Apple in the high-end laptop/desktop space.

Intel/AMD's only advantage would be compatibility with legacy software.

Apple's market are laptops that sell for $999 & higher and desktop CPUs that sell for $599 & higher and AIO that sell for $1299 & higher.

Anything below that is Windows territory.

 

[acorntoy]

I'm of the opinion that peformance per watt is an over-stated metric. Its useful, yes but Apple leans heavily on that measurement an I don't think its something that the consumers by and large care too much about. They care about battery life (which performance per watt impacts), I could be wrong but there are classes of windows machines that offer close or similar battery life.

Where Apple excels at, and where ARM Windows fails it X86 emulation. Apple hit it out of the park with high performance and high compatibility in X86 emulation. Arm Windows has not. I've had to deal with programs not running or running poorly - very poorly.

Until MSFT Fixes ARM windows, it won't matter what ARM processors they use, and while I love the idea of competition and see some impressive rumors with Nuvia I don't think PC sector will be able to compete with Apple on that front.

"I could be wrong but there are classes of windows machines that offer close or similar battery life."

While performing vastly worse. They aren't comparable. In the mobile world full of batteries performance per watt is absolutely critical. In a desktop scenario look at how much power bitcoin mines use and the environmental damage they are causing, efficiency is absolutely important.

It's like saying Horsepower per Liter doesn't matter. I absolutely want Apple to have some healthy competition however, and I hope Qualcomm or even Mediatek can catch up and light a fire under their butts, performance per watt is gonna be a huge metric for a long time because watts have been vastly restricted by the mobile era. PPW is what started Apple looking into creating their own chips in the first place.

 

[acorntoy]

For those who don't know, Nuvia was a startup created by ex-Apple Silicon leaders, including the Chief Architect. They wanted to build a server CPU at Apple but management didn't give the green light. So they left and formed Nuvia. Qualcomm bought Nuvia for $1.4B and directed the team to focus on a laptop chip instead.

The money payoff must off been nice but damn that's a round of slaps in the face "no server, we bought you for laptops!".

 

[MrGunny94]

Should be fixed with that new QC chip hopefully

I'll be first in line to get this new QC chip to run Arch Linux on it.

 

[Scarrus]

Consumers care about battery life, laptop temperature, laptop noise, speed, size of laptop, weight of laptop. All of these things are impacted by performance per watt.

Of course, we can make it more obvious by stating something like "performance per watt with a minimum acceptable speed for the application or platform". But I think people generally understand what performance per watt leads to.



It's chicken and egg. It doesn't matter how great Windows on ARM is if non-Apple Silicon ARM chips suck. They certainly suck right now.

Windows on ARM will slowly improve to the point where it will be good to great.

Well they suck compared to the A and M series but compared to x86 they're still a hell of a performance leap(at the same wattage)

Give me a Lenovo Legion(Gaming Laptop) With an ARM CPU with say 35-50 Watt TDP.
That thing would rip anything Intel and AMD has to offer right now.

 

[Kazgarth]

Qualcomm already achieved better performance per watt on the GPU side (than anyone else, including Apple) when they moved their SD8Gen2 to TSMC fab.

Now only CPU part need that extra push from the Nuvia team and its a done deal.

 

[MrGunny94]

Qualcomm already achieved better performance per watt on the GPU side (than anyone else, including Apple) when they moved their SD8Gen2 to TSMC fab.

Now only CPU part need that extra push from the Nuvia team and its a done deal.

View attachment 2147261

I'm still very worried about the GPU drivers once this hits the PC Market. We'll see how things will out, hopefully we can get a product at the end of the year.

Quite curious to see if they put modems in these products as well.

 

[Kazgarth]

I'm still very worried about the GPU drivers once this hits the PC Market. We'll see how things will out, hopefully we can get a product at the end of the year.

Quite curious to see if they put modems in these products as well.

They already had SQ1 SoC on Surface pro X since 2019, that's plenty of time to polish their Windows drivers.