Cristiano Amon, the new CEO of Qualcomm is confident that the company can meet the bar Apple has set with the M1 chip and beat it as well. If this were to happen, we would get M1 speeds on Windows laptops and PCs that are powered by Qualcomm chips. So how exactly does he plan to do this?
Apple announced the M1 in late 2020 and it has become the single biggest piece of PC related news in years. The chip is based on ARM architecture and boasts speeds and energy efficiency that no other company can rival at the moment.
Amon would definitely want to make big promises as he is the new face of Qualcomm and according to Reuters, he already has a plan on how to rival Apple’s M1. Qualcomm has hired a team of former Apple engineers to help them design the chip, instead of waiting for Arm to do it first.
“We needed to have the leading performance for a battery-powered device,” Amon said. “If Arm, which we’ve had a relationship with for years, eventually develops a CPU that’s better than what we can build ourselves, then we always have the option to license from Arm.”
Qualcomm managed to hire these Apple engineers through an acquihire, an acquisition made for employees, of a company called Nuvia. The engineers were working on the development of the M1 chip before leaving to Nuvia. Qualcomm plans to sell chips based on Nuvia designs starting as early as 2022.
