Qualcomm reaffirms their intent to dominate laptop market

[leman]

Qualcomm CEO said that acquisition of Nuvia will allow them to have a competitive ARM laptop chip as early as next year. Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/qualcomms-new-ceo-eyes-dominance-laptop-markets-2021-07-01/

I think that anything that will challenge x86 hegemony is great news as ARM in the mainstream PC will ultimately benefit Apple Silicon and Apple users. Looking forward to what Qualcomm can come up with!

 

[cmaier]

Good luck with that.

 

[jdb8167]

Good luck with that.

Is the skepticism about the time frame or just with Qualcomm in general getting to a competitive SoC?

 

[cmaier]

Is the skepticism about the time frame or just with Qualcomm in general getting to a competitive SoC?

The latter. I’ve seen nothing that suggests that they have the ability to accomplish it, regardless of whether they have hired a few apple alumni. They tied to hire me 15 years ago or so, and it was pretty clear their entire culture and methodology is not conducive to what is needed to compete at the high end of the general purpose processor market. The people who are good at it are the ones with the DEC alumni or the Exponential alumni, and who are willing to think carefully about where every transistor and piece of routing metal goes. They haven’t even been able to be competitive with Apple’s lowest end cpus, and they’ve had many years to try.

The folks they hired may steer them in the right direction, but it takes years to change a culture.

Then you have the problem that you still need to compete with Apple, and Apple has many more “apple alumni” than does qualcomm. And Apple also has the benefit of controlling the compiler, the programming language, the OS, every other chip on the motherboard, etc.

 

[jdb8167]

Then you have the problem that you still need to compete with Apple, and Apple has many more “apple alumni” than does qualcomm. And Apple also has the benefit of controlling the compiler, the programming language, the OS, every other chip on the motherboard, etc.

Theoretically Qualcomm works closely with Microsoft which controls much of the same parts of the developer stack as Apple. The OS and dev tools in particular. But so far, Microsoft seems to be pretty half-hearted on Arm so I’m not sure how much Qualcomm’s collaboration will mean.

 

[cmaier]

Theoretically Qualcomm works closely with Microsoft which controls much of the same parts of the developer stack as Apple. The OS and dev tools in particular. But so far, Microsoft seems to be pretty half-hearted on Arm so I’m not sure how much Qualcomm’s collaboration will mean.

Microsoft works closely with Intel, too, but AMD seems to be able to beat Intel. The difference is that “working closely with” is not the same as what happens at Apple, where a long term vision of a particular capability is worked on collaboratively by designers, software engineers, compiler folks, CPU designers, etc.

When we invented AMD64 we worked ”closely” with Microsoft, and I can tell you that the level of interaction with them is not at all close to how things operate within the walls of Apple HQ.

 

[JMacHack]

Good luck with that.

Fair, but do they have to beat Apple specifically? If they’re looking to dominate the PC market, then wouldn’t they just* have to top Intel and AMD? Apple doesn’t sell their cpus, and Microsoft seems committed to Windows on ARM. Seems like the perfect opportunity to get into the laptop market now that the bandaid has been ripped off.

*not that that is a small feat.

 

[jdb8167]

Should probably move this discussion to this News Discussion thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ndle-apples-shift-to-in-house-modems.2303039/

 

[leman]

Should probably move this discussion to this News Discussion thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ndle-apples-shift-to-in-house-modems.2303039/

Well, I posted it before MR

 

[jdb8167]

Well, I posted it before MR

Sure but front page gets a lot more traffic.

Still more useful posts here in less than 10 posts than the 25 there so maybe if the mods keep this open it might be better.

Edit: Actually this thread is on the front page too

 

[haralds]

Good luck with that.

Quoting Gruber. That's what is was thinking.

 

[cmaier]

Quoting Gruber. That's what is was thinking.

Difference between me and Gruber is that I’ve actually designed CPUs, and I would never live in Philly.

 

[ArPe]

Difference between me and Gruber is that I’ve actually designed CPUs, and I would never live in Philly.

I designed a CPU (in my mind) that can change its design on the fly. If you’re running Blender the CPU configures itself to be optimized for that, same with Premiere, anything. The foreground app sends the ideal design to the CPU or FPGA ? and everything happens almost in real time.

 

[JMacHack]

I would never live in Philly.

philly and Pittsburgh guys are something else. They usually love their cities despite them being Philly and Pittsburgh.

 

[dmccloud]

Qualcomm is certainly optimistic regarding their prospects. Even their highest end Snapdragon chips pale in comparison to Apple's latest mobile silicon, so I'm not sure how they intend to compete with the M1 (or more likely the next M-series processor in Apple's arsenal). Wayne Gretzky once said “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” - unfortunately, it feels like Qualcomm always tries to match Apple's current products instead of trying to anticipate where the A-series is going and trying to get there first. Even the SQ1 and SQ2 processors used in the Surface Pro X pales next to the M1 (and ARM-based builds of Windows perform better on the M1 than on the SPX based off multiple tests and comparisons). What is interesting is that both the SQ1 and SQ2 are apparently variants of existing Snapdragon 8cx SoCs, just without the 5G support. The SQ1 was a variant of the Snapdragon 855, so the SQ2 would likely be a variant of the 865. This is in stark contrast to Apple's approach, where they use the same Icestorm and Firestorm cores, but brought additional DDR channels, a wider instruction bus, T2 functionality, and moved the RAM onto the die among other features unique to the M-series SoC.

In my mind, Qualcomm will not be able to truly compete with Apple in performance per watt (or even overall performance) unless they make a clean distinction between their mobile (smartphone/tablet) and desktop (laptop/desktop) product lines.

Microsoft works closely with Intel, too, but AMD seems to be able to beat Intel. The difference is that “working closely with” is not the same as what happens at Apple, where a long term vision of a particular capability is worked on collaboratively by designers, software engineers, compiler folks, CPU designers, etc.

When we invented AMD64 we worked ”closely” with Microsoft, and I can tell you that the level of interaction with them is not at all close to how things operate within the walls of Apple HQ.

We should thank your team for AMD64 - it led to the justified death of Itanium (coming from someone who jumped on the Windows XP x64 bandwagon early on in its development)...

 

[cmaier]

We should thank your team for AMD64 - it led to the justified death of Itanium (coming from someone who jumped on the Windows XP x64 bandwagon early on in its development)...

Thank a sudden departure by lots of folks which left us incapable of doing anything with itanium-like complexity, combined with Fred Weber’s genius and a tiny team of dedicated chipmonkeys who did things like edit the chip’s layout in vi on the day of tapeout to fix a last minute bug. I find it weird that a certain person takes credit for it today when that person had very little to do with anything, but I’ll keep my mouth shut.

 

[JMacHack]

Thank a sudden departure by lots of folks which left us incapable of doing anything with itanium-like complexity, combined with Fred Weber’s genius and a tiny team of dedicated chipmonkeys who did things like edit the chip’s layout in vi on the day of tapeout to fix a last minute bug. I find it weird that a certain person takes credit for it today when that person had very little to do with anything, but I’ll keep my mouth shut.

In my experience those who put in the least work often claim the most credit.

 

[pshufd]

Qualcomm is certainly optimistic regarding their prospects. Even their highest end Snapdragon chips pale in comparison to Apple's latest mobile silicon, so I'm not sure how they intend to compete with the M1 (or more likely the next M-series processor in Apple's arsenal). Wayne Gretzky once said “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” - unfortunately, it feels like Qualcomm always tries to match Apple's current products instead of trying to anticipate where the A-series is going and trying to get there first. Even the SQ1 and SQ2 processors used in the Surface Pro X pales next to the M1 (and ARM-based builds of Windows perform better on the M1 than on the SPX based off multiple tests and comparisons). What is interesting is that both the SQ1 and SQ2 are apparently variants of existing Snapdragon 8cx SoCs, just without the 5G support. The SQ1 was a variant of the Snapdragon 855, so the SQ2 would likely be a variant of the 865. This is in stark contrast to Apple's approach, where they use the same Icestorm and Firestorm cores, but brought additional DDR channels, a wider instruction bus, T2 functionality, and moved the RAM onto the die among other features unique to the M-series SoC.

In my mind, Qualcomm will not be able to truly compete with Apple in performance per watt (or even overall performance) unless they make a clean distinction between their mobile (smartphone/tablet) and desktop (laptop/desktop) product lines.



We should thank your team for AMD64 - it led to the justified death of Itanium (coming from someone who jumped on the Windows XP x64 bandwagon early on in its development)...

It's the difference between talking about doing it and doing it without talking about it.

 

[11235813]

They can do it but they need a lot of support from Microsoft. I'm sure their best chips today would perform better than an Intel i3 if Windows ARM was ready and optimized. They can start by dominating the lower end of the market then move up.