It's a laptop chip. It's claiming to be "setting the benchmark for Windows PCs"- as in, they think it will be faster than Intel and AMD.
Because a modem is not something you need to target laptops, what to me, it means they are also targeting smaller devices, ultra-portables, 2-in-1, tablets... but for those you actually need small cores, i really hope thats not the case here.
The big difference always will be that Apple does its own stuff in its own "magical" world. Apple is a lifestyle company, and even without having any leadership in performance and/or efficiency Apple can easily fall back to "only" being a popular manufacturer of lifestyle products. Qualcomm, Intel and AMD can't do that.
So, if you haven't noticed, throwing this kind of money at a problem fails as often as it succeeds. The M&A world is littered with corpses. I doubt Qualcomm will have sufficient additional earning from that 1.4B price tag so that it pays itself back in any reasonable time frame. I think it's more about showing stock holders that the C-suite is doing all it can to acquire top talent, patents and attention, all to keep the stock price up. It's a bit of a shell game, IMHO. Maybe I'm wrong - we'll see.
Fair point.
It makes sense as the 5G rollout continues - particularly in cities. The data rates, when the signal is good, it quite a bit better than LTE and much more useable out of the office.
Well, that is not entirely true. Apple still has to lead the performance and/or efficiency vs competition in order to justify their premium pricing. Otherwise, PowerPC to Intel to AS transition wouldn’t have happened.
It would be funny if the same employees who walked out on Apple and other companies to form this Nuvia, walked out on Qualcomm to start yet another Arm start up...
All laptops don't have LTE/5G modems in it because Intel/AMD doesn't have integrated one yet. But always connected laptop is the way things are going, even those x86-laptops will need to have LTE/5G modems soon.
Why? Despite having x86 for the past 15 years they have been behind what you could get in PC laptops most of that time because they only updated their products every year or two. Meanwhile Intel was releasing new SKUs every few months, and there are a list of PC laptops from multiple companies available with those new SKUs almost immediately. The only time Apple actually had a "lead" was a few times where they got Intel to provide them a custom SKU - like they did when they introduced the Macbook Air and basically created a new laptop category. Most of the time when Apple introduced new Macs they were only catching up to where the PC market was, or maybe front running the Dells of the world for a month or two since Intel gave them special treatment.
My gut feeling tells me the whole Nuvia thing was just a way to get a big payday. And that the server CPU's spiel was just fluff. I don't expect them to stay at Qualcomm any longer than they have to.
I remember that well. Performance was an issue, though Jobs hyped up that problem 10 fold to justify to users the need to switch (I know, shocking
) . His team did kind of jab IBM in the eye by insisting that IBM get the G5 up to 1GHz without any alterations to the Altivec engine (which was presenting problems with scaling). Kind LOL today.
Actually in the keynote he said the G5 would hit 3 GHz in year, when he announced the 2 GHz G5. So, not up to 1 GHz but that it would increase by 1 GHz. And he didn't tell IBM ahead of time he would say that. Also, that was the time that one of the VPs coined the phrase "premature specification", when the G5 specs showed up briefly on Apple's live website before the keynote.I remember that well. Performance was an issue, though Jobs hyped up that problem 10 fold to justify to users the need to switch (I know, shocking
Apple was already recovering well before the switch the x86. Jobs pushed for creative new Macs designs and had top notch marketing at the time (well, and since). I almost invested in 2002 based dramatic changes within Apple and seeing some very successful investors dump a ton of money on Apple (I still regret passing on that). Moving over to the x86 platform, for a host of reasons as you well point out, was the only way to keep the Mac business profitable; and it succeeded.
Who the heck is going to pay for a second 5G data plan just to use their laptop off WiFi? When you can just tether to your phone, for the 2 times a year you might use it? It doesn't make sense, especially now that more people are working from home.
What does this mean?
The startups not trying to go for a big payday are a huge exception indeed. And I don't think the focus on server CPU was just fluff, for a startup it was the biggest possible TAM of potential buyers since there are more huge companies running their own more an more customized huge datacenters than there are companies that create more or less custom consumer SoCs on a large scale. So in a way it's "unfortunate" Qualcomm picked them up considering how many possible buyers there were in the datacenter space, but I doubt they mind considering the amount of money that moved.
I have a 4G data plan for my wife's iPad 7. I could never teach her to tether the damn thing. Having the data plan is so much easier. Mind you, it's only a 4 GB plan and I only pay $5 a month for it.
I still do not know what you mean by a lifestyle brand, and what heuristic you are trying to convey that is intuitive to you but I can not see.
Yes, I think we agree. Maybe we put a different name on it, but nothing you wrote I disagree with.
My point was the difference of Apple's competitive environment to that of Qualcomm, Intel and AMD. You elaborated that well for Apple.
Most of the WARM lappies out there that I researched were available almost exclusively from Verizon or AT&T and could only be bought with a mobile data plan. Qualcomm wants to be able to continue to service that market.
What I meant by subset of A series chips requiring
That too. It would just cost die area.
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