Qualcomm’s M1-class laptop chips will be ready for PCs in “late 2023”
It&#x27;s funny, I honestly doubt Qualcomm can compete at this point. Intel intends to be on the same node as Apple by EOY 23, so honestly Qualcomm would have to make a pretty competitive chip to have a chance at playing in the big leagues. Look at it this way: Qualcomm needs to have CPU performance that can beat Intel and iGPU performance that can compete with Ryzen chips, that&#x27;s the entry-level requirement to start convincing people that ARM is the future on PC. Of course, this is not going to happen, especially if they&#x27;re on some podunk 7nm Samsung lithography or something of that vain.<p>I can see this unfolding one of two ways, neither of which are good for Qualcomm:<p>1. Intel takes back the performance crown and recoups their efficiency losses over the next 2 or 3 generations. They double or triple their density, start aggressively buying up TSCM silicon to supplement their own fabs, and go back to being the de-facto PC CPU manufacturer.<p>2. AMD pushes hard on their efficiency, 3D cache and iGPU technologies, muscling Intel out of the competition and making an indisputable case for their dominance in the mobile&#x2F;laptop category. Everyone except long-time Intel contractors switch their main products for Ryzen chips, and eventually they get the leverage they need to take over the professional&#x2F;business sector too.<p>Notice how nowhere I said &quot;Qualcomm, a company with little to no history in the field of PC manufacturing, designs a chip that will likely be slower than it&#x27;s x86 counterparts, has no means of emulating the x86 software people buy Windows machines for, and magically finds it&#x27;s way into hundreds of consumer machines.&quot; That&#x27;s because it&#x27;s a pipe dream, and with the nature of PC computing, you simply can&#x27;t transition architectures in the same way Apple did. I reckon x86 is going to stay relevant for at least another 5-10 years on the Windows&#x2F;Linux side of things, and by the time people <i>are</i> sick and tired of it, I think we&#x27;ll be eyeing RISC-V chips by then. ARM is starting to get long in the tooth, and it&#x27;s advantages as an architecture have pretty substantially diminished over the last 20 years. It also still hasn&#x27;t solved big problems like SIMD execution or ISA modularity yet; there&#x27;s a real chance for another architecture to eat it&#x27;s lunch in the distant future.