Qualcomm learned from the pain and developed its own core architecture to maintain its competitive advantage
Qualcomm only showed off at this year's new product launch conference, although the performance is not as good as Apple's M2, but with its own research and development of personal computer processors, it has been frustrated in the field of mobile phone chips, and finally lost to its own personal computer processors.
Qualcomm used to be the leader in the field of mobile phone chips, but since the advent of the Snapdragon 820, Qualcomm has abandoned the core developed by itself and replaced it with an ARM standard core, which is why Qualcomm has been left far behind in the processor.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8G1 has seen a drop in performance compared to the A13 from two years ago, due to the higher power consumption of the Arm Supercore X series, coupled with the fact that Qualcomm's two top-of-the-line chips – the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 8G1 – have significant thermal issues.
And Qualcomm and MediaTek competition is also becoming more and more fierce, their Snapdragon 8G1 and Dimensity 9000 are dual-core X2X + 3 core A710 + 4 core A53, and the main difference is TSMC's process, because MediaTek is cheaper, and Chinese mainland MediaTek is more popular with Chinese manufacturers, so since 2020, Qualcomm has been ranked behind MediaTek in the field of mobile devices in the world.
Both Qualcomm and MediaTek use Arm's public core, so now the industry is making fun of them as assembly chip companies, that is, the public core of the acquisition of Arm, plus TSMC's contract manufacturing, and testing.
Compared with Qualcomm and MediaTek, Apple has always adhered to its own core structure, so by 2015, its A-series chips have surpassed Qualcomm and MediaTek. In 2020, Apple released its excellent M-series chips, a move that came as a huge blow to Arm.
At the same time, Apple's M-series chips also use the core structure developed by themselves, and the performance has reached the level of 2020i5, breaking through the cycle of "weak electricity" of the Arm architecture, and the M-series chips developed by Intel replace traditional PCs.
In fact, Qualcomm has also conducted research on the PC-level chip of the Snapdragon 8 CX, but because the Snapdragon 8 CX still uses the core of the public version, it is similar to the Snapdragon 8xx series in terms of performance, not to mention compared with the Apple M series, probably because of the existence of this chip, Qualcomm began to focus on high-performance chips with ARM architecture.
At this time, Nuvia, an emerging semiconductor company, was planning to sell it, and Nuvia, the Apple A series created by a research team led by Gerald Williams, was planning to sell it. Williams and his colleagues created the company with the initial idea of expecting Apple to buy it, and Qualcomm bought it for $1.4 billion.
After Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia, Qualcomm once again had a study of its key structures, which made Qualcomm confident in its ability to surpass AppleM2 in basic features.
Apple's M-series chips have become a popular product in the field of personal computer chips, its performance is similar to Intel's, but the energy consumption is only half of Intel's, continue to use the low-power structure of the ARM structure, after installing the M series, you can use a smaller size, extend the life of the battery, therefore, MacBook will become thinner and lighter. Although the ARM structure chip consumes little energy, its performance is very good, and it will become a clear stream in the portable computer market.
In other countries, Microsoft has released support for the ARM architecture on Windows, and if Qualcomm can release Snapdragon computers jointly with Microsoft and Qualcomm, Qualcomm will greatly expand this area.