Seems like Qualcomm has been having some issues with their next version of the Snapdragon, causing them to shift fab operations from Samsung to TSMC.
This is never a good thing. I wonder if Samsung told Qualcomm, “can’t do it within the parameters you specify”
Something similar happened many years ago with Apples early PowerBook 5300 series. The original battery supplier told Apple the tolerances were too tight for the capacity and size required and so, Apple found another vendor, who said basically “ok” even though they didn’t have extensive experience making laptop batteries, only to have the batteries recalled months later for multiple issues and replaced with slightly smaller capacity batteries from the original vendor.
TLDR: It’s never going to turn out well when sales and marketing overrule engineering…
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Qualcomm doesn’t do all that much for phones year over year to begin with, and it is regularly years behind Apple’s SoC team. Usually, the one reliable upgrade Qualcomm can deliver is…
Not much to promote Qualcomm’s prowess as a rival is it…
How in the H does TSMC have any capacity left for processor manufacturing after Apple…
Hyped for Qualcomm’s Nuvia coming to Windows devices in the form of 8cx Gen 4 next year. 8 performance cores with Intel killing IPC, Wi-Fi 7, support for up to three USB 4 (Thunderbolt 4) ports, decode/encode up to 4K120 and encode up to 4K60, including AV1 in both cases… let’s go!
Source:
https://twitter.com/Za_Raczke/status/1616575097761849345
M1 competitor in the face of the 3nm M3? Well, at least it supports 3 TB4 ports on chip…now if only MS would snap it up for a custom Apple killer design…
You are missing a step here. Bear in mind that 8xc Gen 4 is several generations ahead (SQ3 is a Microsoft rebranded 8xc Gen 3). There has been a disparity in the ARM cores that Qualcomm has used in their WOA designs, which use older Cortex designs. The pre-Nuvia 2023 Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, confusing naming to be sure, but the 8 Gen 3 is several generations ahead of 8xc Gen 3 with Cortex-X4 versus 8xc Gen’s Cortex-X1. 8 Gen 3 is coming out this year and it already closes the gap in single-core performance with Apple M2 as explained below. That’s not even Nuvia yet either.
My repeated warnings about Apple’s tectonically slow single-digit percentage year-over-year growth in CPU IPC performance state it would prove to be their undoing in the CPU performance race. While Apple has been content with this single-digit growth, Qualcomm and others have been pushing hard with double digit year-over-year IPC growth so an inflection point like this was only bound to happen with Apple in a constant stupor of complacency. This situation I endeavor to paint below shows this prediction coming to fruition.
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