Heads-up Intel and Apple? Qualcomm showdown 2024

In the past few days of MWC, mobile phone manufacturers have attracted a lot of attention, but most of them are previously released, or non-focused technologies. MWC is essentially a mobile communications conference, where telecom operators, equipment vendors, and baseband chip providers are the real protagonists behind the scenes.

Qualcomm is naturally one of them. In an interview with WSJ reporter Joanna Stern, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon revealed that they will continue to provide baseband chips to Apple in 2023, but will not set any expectations for 2024, suggesting to some extent that Apple will abandon Qualcomm baseband chips in 2024 and produce self-developed baseband chips.

However, according to Caixin, Qualcomm said that the actual meaning expressed by Anmeng is consistent with the previous Qualcomm financial report information. Qualcomm made assumptions about revenue from Apple in its earnings conference, which was more for financial forecasts than to confirm other companies' product plans.

But the boots always have to land. Previously, a more common saying is that Apple will start to carry its own baseband on the iPhone listed in 2025, even if the iPhone 16 in 2024 (expected) cannot be used, but Apple's self-developed baseband is basically ironclad.

On the other hand, Apple is also Qualcomm's biggest rival in the field of Arm PCs. Anmeng also said in the interview that the "sample" of the Snapdragon processor equipped with a custom CPU has been sent to OEMs and will be officially unveiled in September or October this year, and by CES 2024 we will see more new products equipped with this new SoC.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, Photo/Qualcomm

In fact, Qualcomm announced a new custom CPU "Oryon" at last year's Snapdragon Technology Summit, according to Qualcomm senior vice president Gerard Williams III (founder of Nuvia), the Snapdragon SoC based on the Oryon CPU core will be delivered to OEM customers in 2023, and Windows computers equipped with this platform can be listed as soon as the second half of the year.

This will also be the first self-developed CPU launched by Qualcomm after acquiring Nuvia. Coupled with the self-developed Adreno GPU and AI architecture, Qualcomm finally has the confidence to challenge Apple's M series chips and even x86 in the PC market.

Nuvia: Born in Apple, grown up from Qualcomm

In August 2020, Nuvia, an obscure startup, tested its Phoenix prototype processor with GeekBench 5. Test results show that its single-core performance far exceeds that of the Snapdragon 865, Apple A12X and A13 in the same period. Nuvia claims that Phoenix cores will provide 50% to 100% peak performance improvement over other cores, and at the end they also said that they intend to let Phoenix cores run above 5W in the future to provide more powerful processing performance.

At this time, Nuvia was less than a year old. In November 2019, three chip industry veterans, Gerard Williams III, John Bruno and Manu Gulati, joined forces to form Nuvia. They have worked for global chip giants such as AMD, Apple, ARM, and Broadcom, Gerard Williams III is even the chief architect of Apple's A7 to A14 chip stage, John Bruno and Manu Gulati are also core engineers in Apple's chip division, and many of the initial team members are also from Apple.

From left to right: John Bruno, Gerard Williams III, and Manu Gulati, Photo: Data Center Dynamics

At the beginning, Nuvia aimed to create high-performance ARM architecture chips that revolutionized the server chip market dominated by x86. Two years later, Qualcomm announced that it had acquired the startup for $1.4 billion. Qualcomm hopes to launch its own CPU architecture through the acquisition of Nuvia, reduce the use of Cortex design from ARM, and achieve stronger CPU performance and energy efficiency, just like Apple's self-developed M series chips.

The arrival of Nuvia has also greatly enhanced Qualcomm's ambitions for the PC market. Over the past two years, Arm PC share has soared, even in the PC market winter of 2022. But the actual winner is only Apple, with the high performance and energy efficiency of the M series chip, MacBook has greatly changed the internal design, noise, heat, battery life have been greatly improved, and at the same time in many productivity areas of efficiency has been significantly improved, has been collectively recognized by the consumer market.

However, limited by the limitations of the ARM public architecture, the performance provided by the Snapdragon SoC is almost uncompetitive in the PC market, coupled with the problems in goals and collaboration between Qualcomm and Microsoft, resulting in the delay in the progress of the Windows on Arm ecosystem.

Based on Nuvia's self-developed CPU, Qualcomm hopes to launch a Snapdragon SoC that can match or even surpass Apple's M series, through the M series chips on Windows laptops and MacBooks in the PC market:

Battle it out.

New Oryon CPU, Figure/Qualcomm

In previous earnings calls, Amon also expected that the Snapdragon Windows PC will have an inflection point in 2024. Everything seems to point out that the Snapdragon SoC with self-developed CPU, GPU and AI architecture will officially hit the laptop market in 2024. But before that, Qualcomm also needs to worry about blocking from a British chip company.

ARM's blocking can't stop Qualcomm's ambitions

On the eve of last year's Snapdragon Technology Summit, the litigation war between long-time partners - ARM and Qualcomm began to be popular.

The ARM Party requires Qualcomm to comply with Nuvia ALA's termination terms, including the cessation and destruction of any technology developed under Nuvia ALA, as well as monetary damages. Qualcomm accused ARM of confusing the public and not having the right to demand the destruction of Qualcomm's CPU technology, and the termination of the Nuvia license agreement was also "unexpected."

Back in 2021, Qualcomm said in its announcement announcing the acquisition of Nuvia that products and technologies developed by Nuvia under the ARM license will be incorporated into Qualcomm's portfolio to power smartphones, next-generation laptops, smart cars, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions.

ARM later said that neither Qualcomm nor Nuvia notified Arm of the transaction in advance, nor did they obtain Arm's consent to the transfer of Nuvia's license, and then terminated Nuvia's license agreement.

But in the end, the two are still a conflict of interests, ARM is trying to guarantee a huge license fee from Qualcomm, and Qualcomm does not want to pay excessive licensing fees to ARM after developing its own CPU architecture.

Cortex CPU，图/ARM

Of course, at least for now, ARM and Qualcomm do not intend to "fish dead nets", the main purpose of the two sides is to strive for greater interests. Although Varma, director of product management at Qualcomm, said that Arm is the "traditional architecture" and the RISC-V architecture is the "future", even if the Android ecosystem is to fully migrate to RISC-V, it will take a long process.

The final result of the lawsuit is likely to be that Qualcomm and ARM reached a settlement agreement, but Qualcomm may need to pay higher licensing fees, which will not prevent Qualcomm's attack in the PC market in 2024.

Snapdragon PC, Final Battle 2024

Amon said at the time of the acquisition of Nuvia: "The world-class Nuvia team will enhance our CPU product roadmap and extend Qualcomm's technology leadership in the Windows, Android and Chrome ecosystems."

At least in the Windows ecosystem, Qualcomm's so-called "technology leadership" needs to put a big question mark, the Wintel alliance has not broken, Intel and AMD represent x86 still occupies the vast majority of the Windows PC market.

Intel CPU, Photo/Intel

But at the same time, the Arm PC did usher in a key shift. Apple has proved with an M1 chip based on the Arm architecture that Arm can achieve performance comparable to x86, and the energy efficiency is far better than x86.

Subsequent sales also reflect consumer recognition of the MacBook, an Arm architecture chip - Apple's market performance continues to outperform, even in the fourth quarter of last year's global PC market 28.1% cliff-like decline, far ahead of the top five manufacturers with a 2.1% decline.

For Qualcomm, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. Mobile Internet trends have made people more accustomed to portable devices and all-weather connected experiences, Qualcomm not only has an advantage in baseband, but also the low power consumption advantage of the Arm architecture can also provide high performance with long battery life, meeting consumer demand for mobility and flexibility.

However, the PC market is an extremely competitive market, with many established players, such as Intel and AMD. Qualcomm not only has to compete with these giants, but more importantly, it is to establish a mature Windows on Arm ecosystem with Microsoft, attract hardware suppliers, and maintain close cooperation with software developers to ensure that its products are widely supported and adaptable in the ecosystem.

At present, the most important core is whether Qualcomm can change the market impression of the past Snapdragon 8cx "either weak performance or power explosion", and give us a surprise in the next Snapdragon SoC for the PC market in 2024, giving Apple a little color and more pressure on x86.

Only then, as consumers, will we be able to say that to Windows on Arm computers:

Take my money.

The title image is from Qualcomm

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