Qualcomm has completed its $ 1.4 billion acquisition of silicon design firm Nuvia, a move that will lead to internal Qualcomm CPU designs. The acquisition should enable Qualcomm to compete with Apple’s silicon division and focus on pushing bigger, better ARM chips into the laptop market. The agreement was announced in January 2021.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Nuvia; the company was only founded in 2019 and has never made a product. Nuvia was focused on building server chips, but Qualcomm seems to be mainly in the engineering tribe here, as the company was founded by three high-ranking engineers from Apple’s silicon division. Nuvia’s CEO Gerard Williams, who was Apple’s chief CPU architect for almost a decade, is now Qualcomm’s SVP of engineering.
Apple is famously dumping x86 Intel CPUs to run internal ARM architecture designs across the company’s laptop and desktop lines. Qualcomm wants to be here to sell chips to all the computer vendors who want to follow suit. Qualcomm’s press release immediately directed its new design source at the upward Apple market, saying: ‘The first Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms incorporating Qualcomm Technologies’ new internally designed CPUs are expected to be used in the second half of 2022 and will designed for high ultra portable laptops. “The outcry that this acquisition will lead to ‘internally designed CPUs’ is a big deal, as Qualcomm currently only has lightweight custom ARM CPUs available.
Apple’s ARM core is leading the way due to the strength of the CPU design. While Apple uses the ARM architecture, the company sends completely custom, internal CPU design. Qualcomm’s SoC CPUs may be renamed ‘Qualcomm Kryo CPUs’, but they never differ much from ARM’s for sale CPU design. The company’s best laptop, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2, uses ARM Cortex A76 CPU core. The top smartphone chip, the Snapdragon 888, uses an ARM Cortex X1 core and Cortex A78 core.
Step out of ARM’s shadow
Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon says the acquisition will enable Qualcomm to develop “differentiated products with leading CPU performance and power efficiency”. Currently, Qualcomm’s distinction in the SoC market is mainly based on its modern technologies (hence the insane promotion of 5G), its Adreno GPU division (which was ATI’s Imageon division before it was acquired in 2009) and its aggressive patent licensing scheme , which excludes competitors. If you have a high quality CPU design house, it will round off the company well.
ARM’s CPU design is basically used in every kind of computer device on earth: servers, smartphones, tablets, laptops, cars, IoT products, maybe a desktop or two, and a million other things. If you have to rotate so many boards at once, that means ARM should be more of a generalist than you would prefer if you were to compete with a laser-focused CPU design house like Apple.
One area with low-hanging fruit is the lower-power CPU bearings that are regularly shipped in Qualcomm’s SoCs. High-quality ARM chips usually have a “big.LITTLE” design, with a set of four higher, faster chips for foreground processing and a set of four lower power, slower cores for background processing and updating. The higher-power core is updated every year, but the lower-power core is only updated every four years. The Cortex A53 was the low-power solution for 2012-2016, and today, the antique Cortex A55 cores, from 2017, are still shipped in the Snapdragon 888 and 8cx Gen2. If you suddenly have more resources for designing the CPU, this is a good start to place the power efficiency components on an annual cadence.
Even under the constraints of the ARM designs that were on the shelves, laptop SoCs were an afterthought in the Qualcomm range. The company’s flagship 2021 Snapdragon 888 smartphone SoC is a cutting-edge design based on the latest ARM X1 / A78 design and built on the latest 5nm manufacturing process, but Qualcomm’s chips for laptops are two generations behind the smartphone designs. The current Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 laptop SoC was only announced three months before Snapdragon 888, but the combination of an ARM Cortex A76 processor and a 7nm manufacturing process makes it equivalent to the Snapdragon 855, a smartphone SoC introduced in 2019 has been released.
The current ARM X1 design meets the demands for a larger, higher power ARM chip. On the one hand, it’s a shame that Qualcomm did not push the chip into the laptop SoC in time, because it seems to be the right direction for a laptop. On the other hand, the X1 is a great example of how uncompetitive Qualcomm would have been with a reliance on an ARM design roadmap. Again, ARM is a generalist, and ‘Bigger and Higher Power’ for ARM is still not bigger and higher than enough to compete with Apple. The 2021, Cortex X1-based Snapdragon 888 still cannot compete with the 2020 Apple A14 Bionic in CPU standards, let alone the best Apple M1 chip. ARM just does not manufacture designs with Apple’s laptops and computer power targets.
While laptops are the first target for Qualcomm, the company does not stop there. The Qualcomm press release states that the company “will integrate next-generation CPUs into a wide portfolio of products, including flagship smartphones, laptops and digital cabins, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, augmented reality solutions and infrastructure networking.” It looks like it’s specifically smart watches and desktops, but it’s a start.