Qualcomm says its upcoming chips will beat Apple M2

“We are aiming to have performance leadership in PC on the CPU, period,” CEO Cristiano Amon said.

Apple announced the M2 chip at the WWDC and called it an improvement over the industry-leading M1 chip that Apple introduced two years back. The succession in the lineup means Apple has been successful in proving how revolutionary its silicon mobile chips can be and that is not good news for industry veterans such as Qualcomm. That is because Apple has shown that its silicon chips not only can power iPhones but also are equally adept to handle Mac-level performance. For Qualcomm, it is a concern and company CEO Cristiano Amon has finally addressed it.

“We are aiming to have performance leadership in PC on the CPU, period,” Amon told CNET in an attempt to show that Apple is soon going to see some competition. But how soon is the real issue here. Qualcomm is hoping to begin using these chipsets as early as 2023 but Apple, on the other hand, would have moved to launch maybe the M3 by then.

It is also a challenge for Qualcomm because it has been making mobile-based processors for PCs far longer than Apple. These chips — available with the Snapdragon branding — have been used on many PCs, such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro X. However, Qualcomm could not bring them to the mainstream. In other words, Qualcomm’s mobile-based processors are not the first choice of a PC brand for its high-end laptop.

It is where Intel fills the gap. Intel has also been Apple’s chip supplier for Macs but the iPhone maker’s efforts towards building homegrown chips for its computers birthed rivalry between the two long-standing partners.

Qualcomm, on the other hand, is famous for its mobile chipsets. Its high-end chipsets are what smartphone companies use in their flagship phones. For instance, Samsung uses Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 on its Galaxy S22 lineup — even though it makes its Exynos lineup of ultra-fast mobile chipsets. Qualcomm has proven to outmatch every other mobile chip manufacturer, but Apple’s silicon is what the company is chasing after now.

Amon said that the company is designing chips with inputs from Nuvia, a company that specialises in high-performance chips running on Arm architecture and was acquired by Qualcomm. He said that Nuvia chips “stand out from its existing crop of Snapdragon processors” and that is what he believes will give Qualcomm an edge over Apple.

Nuvia came into the spotlight after it was discovered that it was formed by Gerard Williams, who led the development of A-series chips at Apple, and two other former Apple chip executives, who left the company back in 2019. The co-founders said they wanted to compete with Intel and AMD, but Apple did not believe them. The iPhone maker said that Nuvia’s main goal was to force Apple to acquire the company, allowing it to buy back its own chip-making technology. But Qualcomm showed up and acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion and with that brought along the expertise that was behind Apple’s A-series chips.