Qualcomm, one of the leading companies when it comes to chipset for smartphones, is now looking to expand its footprints. The company’s new chief Cristiano Amon says that next year, Qualcomm will have a new chip for laptop makers.
He adds that longtime suppliers like Intel and AMD don’t have products that are as energy-efficient as Apple Silicon-based chips and Qualcomm CEO believes that the company can offer the best chip in the market with help from a team of chip architects who formerly worked on the Apple chip but now work at Qualcomm.
The company is also counting on revenue growth from China to power its core smartphone chip business despite political tensions. The U.S. sanctions on Huawei Technologies Co Ltd give Qualcomm an opportunity to generate a lot more revenue.
The chip giant is now looking to push 5G connectivity into laptops and is pairing modems with a powerful central processor unit. Instead of using computing core blueprints from longtime partner ARM, as it now does for smartphones, Qualcomm concluded it needed custom-designed chips if its customers were to rival new laptops from Apple.
Earlier this year, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion which was founded by Apple employees who helped design laptop chips for Apple before leaving to form the startup. Amon adds that Qualcom will start selling Nuvia-based laptop chips next year. He adds: “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.”
ARM is currently being acquired by Nvidia for $40 billion but the deal is under scrutiny over national security grounds as well as competition within the industry. Even Qualcomm has objected to the merger of these two companies. However, Nvidia has received public support from MediaTek, Marvell Technology, and Broadcom Corp for the merger deal.
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