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A new report indicates that Qualcomm is working on a 12-core laptop processor that aims to pose a real challenge to both of Apple’s M-series chips — and it’s coming in 2024.
The information comes from a developer’s tweet thread Cuban Wojciechowski (and spotted by Notebookcheck), which details an “extremely promising” new chip, as described by the developer’s claimed sources. Codenamed “Hamoa,” this Qualcomm chip is said to have eight Performance cores and four Performance cores, and more interestingly, “a similar mem/cache configuration as M1.”
The tweets even indicate that, for the first time, these chips could be paired with discrete graphics cards, which would be a first for ARM-based computers.
In other news: Qualcomm is working on a desktop chip codenamed 2024 "Hamoa" with up to 12 (8P+4E) in-house cores (based on the Nuvia Phoenix design), a similar mem/cache configuration as the M1, explicit support for dGPUs, and “extremely promising” performance, according to my sources.
— Kuba Wojciechowski⚡ (@Za_Raczke) 6 November 2022
So where is all this promising activity coming from? Well, the tweets say that this new chip is “based on the Nuvia Phoenix design”, a CPU core architecture that is made by a startup company that includes ex-Apple and ex-Google processor engineers – and was bought by Qualcomm in 2021. next Hamoa chip could end up being the first fruit of this acquisition, and may be delayed by Qualcomm’s ongoing legal feud with ARM.
These chips, as Notebookcheck observes, could appear in either laptop or desktop form factors, bringing this “extremely promising” performance to a wide variety of computers and devices.
This news follows the launch of what might be the most high-profile Windows on ARM device ever, the Surface Pro 9. The device features the Microsoft SQ3, which is a customized version of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. Microsoft is a big supporter. of ARM-based Windows laptops, and after the past two years of Apple’s M-series devices stealing the show, the stakes have never been higher.
Yet for all the talk of Windows on ARM, the promise of these devices still remains unfulfilled. Qualcomm was really the only serious player in the game, and its attempts to take on Intel, AMD or Apple have not yet produced the kinds of results that have laptop manufacturers and potential buyers convinced. Qualcomm has had three generations of its Snapdragon 8cx SoC (system on a chip) so far, and the number of devices that have adopted these chips remains thin.
But if Qualcomm really has a serious contender on its hands, it will be fascinating to see how it shakes up the game.
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