Qualcomm showed its seriousness in working on processors for PCs, by announcing plans for the next generation ARM-based system on a chip (SoC).
According to Qualcomm, this SoC is designed to be able to produce high performance, including high benchmark scores, for Windows-based PCs. This means that this SoC will later become a challenger to Apple's M series chips.
Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm's chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chip at Qualcomm's 2021 investor day event. The goal is to provide samples of the chip to its consumers in the next nine months, before the chip is finally released in 2023.
The chip itself was designed by the Nuvia team, which was previously acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was formed in 2019 by three former Apple employees who previously worked on the A series chips for various iOS (and iPadOS) devices.
Qualcomm also has a big promise regarding this M1 challenger chip. Namely being a challenger to Apple's M series chips. They are also eyeing to lead the realm of this processor with maintained performance and power consumption.
Not only the processor sector that will be worked on by Qualcomm, because they promise that the GPU Adreno will also be improved in performance to be able to provide desktop-class gaming capabilities for PC products with this chip in the future.
Actually, this is not the first time Qualcomm has tried to enter the realm of SoCs for PCs. Previously they had the Snapdragon 8cx line and worked with Microsoft for the SQ1 and SQ2 chips used in the Surface X.
But then Apple released the M1 which has high performance with low power consumption, making the chip from Qualcomm seem invisible.