This is Qualcomm’s new plan to take on Apple

Qualcomm is a well-established player when it comes to providing chips for smartphones due to the hugely popular Snapdragon series of chips. But Qualcomm is now seriously considering expanding its wings beyond smartphones in the consumer electronics segment. Qualcomm is now eying laptops and it thinks it can make better chips than Apple’s M1 for laptops.
One of the biggest advantages of the new Apple M1 chip is its energy efficiency. Chip makers like Intel, AMD and others are yet to deliver results that are comparable to the new M1 series of chips that Apple made exclusively for the Macbook range. While Qualcomm is dependent on ARM for making chipsets for smartphones, CEO Cristiano Amon thinks to beat Apple in the laptop chip game, the company needs to make its own chips.
Amon told Reuters that “it needed custom-designed chips if its customers were to rival new laptops from Apple.”
So, how can Qualcomm make laptop chips that are better than Apple’s M1? The answer lies in Qualcomm’s recent acquisition of a chip design company named Nuvia. This chip design company was founded by ex-Apple engineers and Qualcomm is reportedly gearing up to make chips for laptops using Nuvia’s technology starting from 2022. Qualcomm had acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion.
“We needed to have the leading performance for a battery-powered device,” Amon told Reuters. “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.” ARM is about to be acquired by Nvidia for $40 billion, “a merger that Qualcomm has objected to with regulators.”