At its 2021 investor day event, Qualcomm announced plans for new PC processors. It plans to have samples in hardware partners hands in around nine months, with product launches with the new chip following in 2023.
The new chip will be a next generation ARM-based SoC and Qualcomm says it is "designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs".
A slide at the investor event read "M-series competitive solution for the PC" hinting that Qualcomm believes its chips will be at least comparable, if not better than Apple's M-series silicon.
The talk of Apple's chips, combined with claims of battery life improvements, lead us to believe that Qualcomm will be mainly focusing on the laptop market with this new chip. Although it would be cool to see some more Mac Mini equivalents in the PC space too.
Earlier this year Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in a massive $1.4 billion deal, The Nuvia team will be designing this new CPU. It's worth noting too, that the company was founded by former Apple employees that had worked on its A-series chips, so they definitely know what they're talking about.
Qualcomm also said it would be beefing up its Adreno GPUs, aiming to offer desktop-class gaming performance on its future products.
This isn't the first time we've seen Qualcomm take aim at the PC market, it previously had a partnership with Microsoft on the Surface X's SQ1 and SQ2 chips. These previous efforts failed to revolutionise anything, but maybe, following the recent acquisition, this latest attempt will turn out to be a lot more exciting.
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