Qualcomm self-developed architecture of the PC processor revealed

Despite several years of experimentation, Qualcomm remains bullish, if not relentless, on Windows on ARM.

At last week's earnings meeting, Qualcomm CEO Ammon once again teased that Windows PCs with Snapdragon chips are expected to reach an inflection point in the market in 2024.

According to the latest revelations, the first PC processor developed by Qualcomm after its $1.4 billion (about Rmb10 billion) acquisition of Nuvia will feature a 12-core CPU design.

Specifically, this CPU is based on Nuvia Phoenix as a prototype development, codenamed Hamoa, with 8 large cores + 4 small cores and small cores of big.LITTLE heterogeneous form. Memory and cache design and Apple M1 similar, while supporting independent graphics, performance is very promising.

It is reported that Qualcomm's processor hopes to achieve is similar to Apple's M-series chips for the PC market "spoiler" effect, it does not use the traditional sense of the ARM public version or Kryo CPU, but only rely on ARM streamlined instruction set, push back.

Nuvia's Phoenix prototype only had a low-key muscle show in August 2020, when it was well ahead of Snapdragon 865, Apple A12X and Apple A13 in GeekBench 5 with a single core and less than 4.5 watts of power consumption.

It is worth mentioning that Gerard Williams III, the main founder of Nuvia, led the development of Apple's A7 (Cyclone core) to A14 (Firestorm core) chips and was also involved in the definition of Cortex-A8/A15 in the early years at ARM.