The way forward for Qualcomm’s PC processor improvement seemingly resides within the fingers of Nuvia, the Arm processor design crew that Qualcomm purchased in early 2021. Qualcomm executives mentioned Wednesday {that a} completed Nuvia-designed product would attain retailer cabinets in late 2023, and that the timeframe doesn’t characterize a delay.
On the finish of the question-and-answer session with Qualcomm executives following the announcement of its second-quarter 2022 earnings, chief government Cristiano Amon was requested concerning the pocket book PC market, and Qualcomm’s plans to penetrate it.
“We’re on observe,” Amon replied. “We have now been working with Microsoft for a few years. So I believe with Home windows 11… as I discussed earlier than, it’s the primary time you’ll have full supporting 64-bit emulation on Arm, the primary time you’ll have a platform which is prepared for industrial and enterprise deployment. We did, inside the quarter, launch with Lenovo, the primary enterprise ThinkPad, and now we have quite a lot of designs with our [Snapdragon] 8cx Technology 3.
“As we take into consideration the following technology, now we have been creating our personal CPU that has been designed by the Nuvia crew, and we’re going after that efficiency…. Excessive scale within the enterprise, and improvement is on observe and we count on to have that in late 2023,” Amon added.
That gave the impression to be a delay, provided that Qualcomm was comparatively particular late final 12 months about its timeframe—and it’s not fairly clear what “have that” means when it comes to both sampling the half or transport it, both. A Qualcomm consultant mentioned in an electronic mail, nevertheless, that the timing was in step with the roadmap the corporate offered at its investor day final November. “2023 refers to system launches,” the Qualcomm consultant mentioned.
At Qualcomm’s investor convention in November 2021, Dr. James Thompson, chief know-how officer at Qualcomm, described the present Nuvia roadmap at the moment. “They’re fairly far alongside at this level,” Thompson mentioned, speaking concerning the first Snapdragon processors that includes Nuvia know-how. “We’ll be sampling a product 9 months from now, or one thing like that.”
If Thompson’s timeframe was correct, that might have put the sampling interval at round August 2022, with a transport product scheduled for someday in 2023. Amon’s assertion implies that it could take greater than a 12 months to pattern the processors to PC corporations, who would then design them in and ship the completed product.
To be truthful, the Nuvia timeline was one of many solely query marks on Qualcomm’s earnings report. Qualcomm reported internet earnings of $2.934 billion, up 67 p.c in comparison with a 12 months in the past, on file income that climbed 41 p.c to $11.164 billion. Handset gross sales shot up by an unimaginable 56 p.c, Qualcomm reported, and the corporate captured 75 p.c of the processors in Samsung’s Galaxy S22 handset. (Samsung usually splits the processors within the Galaxy collection between its personal Exynos processor in addition to the Snapdragon, and the Samsung Exynos 2200, which used an AMD GPU for ray tracing, by no means actually materialized.)
Amon mentioned twice through the name that Qualcomm is now not a communications firm. As an alternative, he mentioned, Qualcomm is a “main related processor firm for the clever edge.”