Qualcomm Wants To Design Its Own Alternative To Apple’s M1

While the chipsets we’ve seen in our smartphones have advanced by quite a bit, what’s been rather exciting in the past year or so has been Apple’s M1 chipset, or the Apple Silicon. This is because with Apple’s reach, they have a good chance of making ARM-based chipsets a mainstream thing.

Unsurprisingly, Apple’s ambitions aren’t going to go unanswered because during an interview with Reuters, Qualcomm’s new CEO Cristiano Amon stated that the company plans to build and develop their own chips that would be a direct competitor to the M1. More interestingly though, they will be doing it without ARM’s help.

ARM’s technology and architecture, for the most part, has been behind the vast majority of SoCs we’ve seen, whether they’re made by Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, Huawei, or Samsung, so it’s interesting that Qualcomm wants to make their own chipset without using ARM’s technology.

Amon explained this by saying, “We needed to have the leading performance for a battery-powered device. 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.”

Qualcomm has also recently acquired a company called Nuvia, a startup founded by former Apple employees who had worked on the Apple Silicon, so Qualcomm will definitely have a head start there.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: m1, Qualcomm, SoC, Social Hit