Qualcomm unveils new PC chip in challenge to Apple, Intel

SAN FRANCISCO – Qualcomm, stepping up its long-running effort to break into the personal computer market, has unveiled a new laptop processor designed to outperform rival products from Intel and Apple.

The new Snapdragon X features 12 high-performance cores capable of crunching data at 3.8 megahertz, Qualcomm said at a company event on Tuesday. The chip is as much as twice as fast as a similar 12-core processor from Intel, while using 68 per cent less power, Qualcomm claims.

The announcement is the latest sign of an increasingly competitive market for computer processors.

Nvidia is working on its own central processing unit

– the brains of a PC – using chip designs from Arm Holdings, people familiar with matter said earlier this week. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel’s long-time rival in computer processors, is developing a new CPU with Arm technology as well.

With Snapdragon X, Qualcomm looks to wow the industry with far speedier performance. It claims the new chip can run 50 per cent faster at peak times than Apple’s M2, which that company has touted as the leading computer processor on the market.

“This will make us the new CPU leader in mobile computing,” said Qualcomm chief financial officer Akash Palkhiwala. “It will deliver leading performance with low cost and low power.”

The company’s stock gained as much as 1.5 per cent following the announcement. Qualcomm shares have lagged a general rally by semiconductor equities in 2023, hurt by sluggish demand in its main market: smartphone chips.

Qualcomm will have to show it can back up these bold assertions if it wants to make inroads into the PC market. Intel’s technology, which AMD licences for its own processors, remains dominant in the industry.

So far, only Apple’s in-house designs have gained significant ground at the expense of that standard, and its share of industry shipments only recently passed 10 per cent.

Snapdragon X stems from chief executive officer Cristiano Amon’s 2021 purchase of start-up Nuvia. That company, founded by former Apple executive Gerard Williams, brought Qualcomm new chip designs and helped make it less reliant on off-the-shelf technology from Arm.

In addition to general advantages in performance, the new processor will have features specifically designed for artificial intelligence (AI) software, Qualcomm said. The chipmaker has argued that AI will only reach its full potential if it migrates out of data centres and into end-user devices, such as mobile phones and PCs.

Nvidia is the leader in data centre chips that speed AI computing, and its own efforts to push into PC processors should intensify competition. That company’s PC offering, along with the new Arm chip from AMD, is expected as early as 2025.

Intel, meanwhile, finds itself under attack in a market that it has dominated since the 1980s. The company, still one of the world’s largest chipmakers, is trying to regain its footing with a huge investment in new technology under CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Separately, Qualcomm announced a new version of its Snapdragon 8 line-up for smartphones. This so-called “system on a chip”, which contains a processor, modem and other components, is the first to be designed with AI workloads in mind, Qualcomm said. BLOOMBERG