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What is stopping Qualcomm? Money. Investing in a top end CPU is expensive and currently there is no buyer for a workstation class CPU other than Apple. Micros

What is stopping Qualcomm? Money. Investing in a top end CPU is expensive and currently there is no buyer for a workstation class CPU other than Apple. Microsoft's ARM efforts have been lackluster and sales has been lethargic. The last time Microsoft tried to jump to another architecture was an expensive failure. Who is going to invest hundreds of billions in jump starting this category with a track record like that? Likewise, Linux. While Linux is a great development platform, Qualcomm isn't going to gamble tens of millions on developers migrating en-mass to a Linux/ ARM platform. Someone has to put up the money and it's a bunch.

apetrovic 6y ago
I agree 100%, and that's the answer to OP statement - it's not enough to just wish that the market is different. Someone needs to put their money where their mouth is. Currently, the only company willing to bet enormous amount of money and frankly the entire Mac platform to change status quo is Apple. Maybe (and I really hope so) Apple will push other ARM processors on the desktop as a side-effects - while Qualcomm is more or less "just" the packer of ARM designed cores, and if I understand the market it's entirely out of their reach to design M1-class CPU, maybe Apple will push ARM to design more efficient desktop cores. Maybe Amazon or Google will do that with their custom ARM silicon now when Apple demonstrated that processors doesn't need to be hot to be powerful. For so long Intel sold us basically the same thing, and we cheered when AMD was just a couple percent faster. However this ends, I'm glad that someone at least rocks the boat.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I suspect Qualcomm focuses far more on their modems and integrating their modems into the CPUs because that is where their IP is. Fundamentally the reason Qualcomm can charge what they charge for their CPUs revolves around bundling their modems. Nvidia is the most likely company to build a higher end ARM CPU to compete with the M1. With the ARM core and their GPU expertise, they could conceivably crank out something which performs much better than Qualcomm.

apetrovic 6y ago

I agree 100%, and that's the answer to OP statement - it's not enough to just wish that the market is different. Someone needs to put their money where their mouth is. Currently, the only company willing to bet enormous amount of money and frankly the entire Mac platform to change status quo is Apple. Maybe (and I really hope so) Apple will push other ARM processors on the desktop as a side-effects - while Qualcomm is more or less "just" the packer of ARM designed cores, and if I understand the market it's entirely out of their reach to design M1-class CPU, maybe Apple will push ARM to design more efficient desktop cores. Maybe Amazon or Google will do that with their custom ARM silicon now when Apple demonstrated that processors doesn't need to be hot to be powerful. For so long Intel sold us basically the same thing, and we cheered when AMD was just a couple percent faster. However this ends, I'm glad that someone at least rocks the boat.

ogre_codes 6y ago
I suspect Qualcomm focuses far more on their modems and integrating their modems into the CPUs because that is where their IP is. Fundamentally the reason Qualcomm can charge what they charge for their CPUs revolves around bundling their modems. Nvidia is the most likely company to build a higher end ARM CPU to compete with the M1. With the ARM core and their GPU expertise, they could conceivably crank out something which performs much better than Qualcomm.