As of June 30th, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon has taken over as the corporate’s CEO, changing his predecessor Steve Mollenkopf, who has now retired. Prior to the appointment, Amon had an extended historical past and tenure at Qualcomm filling engineering roles, and beforehand filling the position of president of QCT (The firm’s semiconductor enterprise).
In statements to Reuters, Amon had made feedback concerning the corporate’s future CPU roadmap, which come to additional contextualise the corporate’s accomplished acquisition of NUVIA final March.
“We needed to have the leading performance for a battery-powered device,” Amon mentioned. “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.”
The wording right here is once more very bullish on Qualcomm’s half, reinforcing the concept that the corporate is extraordinarily assured in NUVIA’s CPU microarchitecture and that it’ll don’t have any subject in differentiating itself when it comes to efficiency in comparison with what Arm has obtainable when it comes to CPU IP. Last March, the corporate had famous that work on integrating NUVIA’s customized CPU core right into a laptop-oriented Snapdragon SoC can be an instantaneous focus, with Amon now stating that they’re planning on bringing such a design to market in 2022.
In phrases of timeline and towards which Arm core the NUVIA design would possibly compete towards depends upon when precisely in 2022 the brand new chip would possibly make it to market – if it’s within the first half, then we’ll see it compete towards the already introduced Cortex-X2 cores from Arm. If it’s within the latter half, it’s attainable it will likely be positioned towards Arm’s next-gen Sophia cores. In both case, Qualcomm appears assured when it comes to beating the Arm Cortex designs, which bodes nicely for next-gen Snapdragons.
Amon’s remark that if Arm is ready to construct a greater CPU than Qualcomm’s personal designs can be harking back to the corporate’s earlier era customized CPU endeavours: the final time the corporate had employed a customized microarchitecture was within the 2016 Snapdragon 820 with its Kryo cores. Competing Cortex cores had been sooner and extra energy environment friendly in a smaller space footprint, which lead the corporate to make use of these designs as a substitute, and ultimately resulting in Qualcomm dissolving its CPU design groups – a call which later ended up with no in-house design capabilities up till the current NUVIA buy.
