[Hardware] Qualcomm gears up to challenge Intel, AMD and Nvidia

[rlex]

 

Qualcomm, known for its Snapdragon ARM SoC’s, claims that the company is "very well positioned to be the preferred platform for PCs, in the inevitable transition to ARM." The comments came during the company’s 2021 investor day presentation. It’s a very big statement. 

Snapdragon System-on-Chips (SoCs) are often found in high performance mobile devices thanks to their very good performance per watt, a trait that's common to ARM devices in general, but they don’t have the raw performance to compete with established CPUs from Intel and AMD. That could be changing if new ARM cores from Nuvia, a recently acquired division of Qualcomm, can deliver performance that you'd expect from a PC with a good spec or a high-performance gaming laptop.

The Nuvia designed CPU cores are being designed from the ground up to support PC workloads, where there's a lower emphasis on power efficiency. Additionally, as reported by Tom's Hardware, its Adreno GPUs are being designed to scale up to the levels of discrete PC graphics cards. Of course, that means they could land anywhere between a GTX 1050 or an RTX 3080, but if you let your team design a GPU with 20x the power budget of a phone GPU, the resulting performance could be very interesting indeed.
ARM devices are gradually making inroads beyond the mobile market. Apple is committed to ARM with its excellent and stunningly efficient M1 SoC’s. Nvidia, which lacks an x86 license, is looking to buy ARM outright and Microsoft is ramping up its efforts to support the ARM ecosystem with its upcoming Windows 11 Android app support. Windows support is something that’s seen as a vital step on the path to widespread ARM adoption.

https://www.pcgamer.com/qualcomm-gears-up-to-challenge-intel-amd-and-nvidia/