Qualcomm Overheats The M2 Chip More Fiercely, Now Preparing To Beat The Apple Market

The ultra-fast processor from Qualcomm that was launched to rival Apple isn't coming any time soon. (photo: doc. qualcomm)

JAKARTA - Apple has established itself as one of the industry's leading companies that produce extremely powerful chips. The M1 chip was a pretty impressive brain when Apple introduced it in MacBooks and iPads, now the new M2 chip is even more so.

How revolutionary the M1 and M2 chips are in terms of performance and power efficiency, Qualcomm is, no doubt, very surprised.

It's clear Apple has been working on something that can compete with Qualcomm's best chips, but neither company expected it to succeed so dramatically with its first-generation Mac processors.

However, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon is looking to beat the M2 chip in the laptop and desktop PC sector, thanks to the expertise of the three former Apple Silicon engineers he worked with. "We aim to have performance leadership in PCs on CPU, period," Amon asserts.

Unfortunately, there is a problem because the ultra-fast processor from Qualcomm, which was launched to compete with Apple, is not coming anytime soon, but is claimed to be at the end of 2023.

A series of controversial events did give some very senior Apple Silicon engineers a home at Qualcomm.

Former series A chip leader Gerard Williams and two other former Apple chip executives left the company in 2019 to create a new chip company, Nuvia. All three said at the time that they planned to compete with Intel and AMD.

Launching 9to5Mac, Thursday, June 9, Apple doesn't believe them, and claims their real intention is to force Apple to acquire the company, buying back its own technology.

The dispute was still unresolved when there was a new development earlier this year, Qualcomm buying Nuvia for 1.4 billion US dollars equivalent to Rp. 20.3 trillion. That gave Qualcomm access to much of the expertise behind Apple's development of the M1 chip.

Citing CNET, Qualcomm is best known for making chips for high-end and affordable smartphones. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is one of the best chips and powers most flagship smartphones.

However, the company has actually been making cellular-based chipsets long before Apple. In fact, the Microsoft Surface Pro X came out almost a year before Apple introduced the M1-powered chipset.

The company has high hopes for chips designed as part of its Nuvia acquisition, specializing in high-performance chips that run on the so-called Arm architecture, the kind that powers everything from smartphones to iPads.

Amon said that Nuvia chips stand out from existing Snapdragon processors and will focus on high-performance computing to power the CPU, GPU and neural processing for artificial intelligence.

Qualcomm has been supplying Snapdragon processors to computers for years, but the company has never managed to make a splash in the market. Earlier versions of the chip were very underpowered and barely worked well.

It was Apple that managed to show just how good a mobile processor can be. Amon stated that he is grateful to Apple for encouraging the development of the program that works on Arm.

Moreover, due to COVID-19 and more people working remotely it is also helping to change laptop requirements. Amon stated that suddenly having round-the-clock connectivity, better cameras, and on-the-go capabilities became a necessity and played an important role in the core features of Snapdragon.