Qualcomm aims for leadership in the CPU market: we will beat Apple M2

“We will beat Apple’s M2 SoC”. So we can summarize the latest statements from Qualcomm’s CEO who, in a recent interview with Reutershas stated without issue that the company’s ambitions for the PC / notebook CPU market are very high and the target may be within reach, especially following last year’s Nuvia acquisition.

After the launch of the first generation of M1 proprietary SoCs, it is not the first time that such claims have been heard; giants of the caliber Intel – in addition to Qualcomm itself – could not help but go on the counterattack, although they could not deny the excellent work done by the Apple engineers who, needless to say, also repeated themselves with the new SoC M2 announced on Monday at WWDC 2022.

Returning instead to the statements of Christian Amonit is evident that the CEO Qualcomm is very sure of the potential present in the company, enriched in 2021 also by the technical background of Nuvia engineers. But why Nuvia?

For those who have not followed the story, Nuvia was founded by three former Apple engineers who worked until 2019 in the Apple Silicon project, among these the name of Gerard Williams, a technical figure of a certain weight in Cupertino. Subsequently, after founding Nuvia, the team stated that the company’s goal was to compete with AMD and Intel in the CPU segment for desktop and notebook PCs, a claim that was not liked by Apple’s top management, convinced instead that it was an attempt to convince Apple itself to essentially “buy back” its own technology.

Cristiano Amon did not hesitate to make a joke even on the possibility of losing Apple as a customer for its modems, at this point very concrete since the company has been working on it for about two years (we talked about it HERE). In this regard, Amon says Qualcomm’s numbers in this sector are still growing and he doesn’t seem to care too much:

They know our number, they know where to find us.

Joking aside, given the will, resources and results obtained with Apple Silicon SoCs, this moment shouldn’t be far off; Qualcomm itself estimates that by 2023 the percentage of its modems used on Apple devices will drop to 20% and then decrease until the collaboration between the two producers is stopped.