Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The future of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors”.
Hey there, my name is gary sims, and this is android authority and there are lots of interesting things going on in terms of the processes that we find at the heart of our smartphones. For example, nvidia is in the process of buying arm and that’s rustling. A few feathers we’ve got the collaboration between samsung and amd and samsung should soon have a processor available with an amd gpu in it, and qualcomm have recently purchased nuvia now, you’ve probably heard of amd samsung, nvidia and so on. You probably haven’t heard of nuvia.
Now this could be actually the most important of all the things that i’ve just talked about and could really change snapdragon processors over the next few years. So if you want to find out more, please let me explain so nuvia was a company was founded a few years ago with the idea to make server processors and cpu cores designed for server processors using the same kind of ideas and technology that we find in Smartphones so you’re talking about high performance, but also low power consumption. Of course, when you have a whole, you know data center full of servers, the lower the power consumption, the better. It is in terms of overall cost, of course, to the environment and to everything else. So they want they started this company to make these kind of process now who started this company? Well, in fact, it’s made by several different people who will look at in detail in a moment, but the leader, the the ceo, is a guy called gerard williams iii, who was actually the chief cpu architect at apple all the way from the days when apple produced Their first 64-bit custom cpu design the cyclone right through to firestorm the cpus that were designed in the latest iphone and, of course, in the m1 powered max. So this guy has done a lot of work for apple in terms of designing high performance, energy, efficient processors, and he got together with a few other industry heavyweights who, as i said, we’ll talk about in a moment and they made nuvia and they got venture capitalist Funding and everything was going according to their plan until an offer came along for qualcomm to buy the company. Now that meant buying all the engineers, all the staff, all the designs.
Everything gets moved over straight to qualcomm and qualcomm have said that that technology is going to be used in the snapdragon processors not only for smartphones, but also for other areas like automotive over the next few years. So, let’s first of all look at who those people were next to gerard williams, a third and then also look at what they were proposing to build and then imagine what that would mean for a snapdragon processor in the future. So quick recap about jared williams iii. He was a senior director at apple and the chief cpu architect for nearly a decade and, of course, before he was at apple.
He was 10 years at arm itself, so lots and lots of experience designing arm processors. He was a chief architect for all apple cpu and soc development and the cpu lead for cyclone typhoon, twister hurricane monsoon, vortex, lightning and firestorm and firestone, of course, is the latest one that we find in the iphone and the m1 processor. But he was joined by some other big heavyweights, for example manu galuti. I hope i’m pronouncing that right.
He was the lead soc architect for consumer hardware at google and before that, from 2009 to 2017, he was the lead soc architect for several iphone and ipad socs, including the a5x, the a7, the a9, the a11, the a12 and the a12 x. So again, lots of experience in designing cpu cores based on the arm architecture and they are joined by john bruno who, prior to co-founding nuvia, was a system architect at google driving such areas as soc definition and competitive performance and power analysis. And before that he was a system architect at apple from 2012 to 2017.. So, as you can see, some heavyweights there in terms of designing armed, cpus and arm-based processors, and all that technology now will be taken over to qualcomm who’ll, be able to integrate it into their snapdragon processors. Now this doesn’t mean that apple are no longer able to design their own processes. That work, of course, is continuing.
There are lots of other, mainly talented engineers over there. This is talking about the designs that nuvi were working on the technology. That movie will work on and how that will get integrated into qualcomm’s products.
So let’s have a look at some of the things that nuvi were saying about their designs before the company was sold to qualcomm, okay. So here’s a very interesting graph don’t get uh startled by it. Let’S take it through step by step. This is about performance per watt. So obviously, if you want more performance, then you need to crank up the energy consumption, and this is talking about how much you can get per watt and, let’s understand the layout of the graph before we get in to the exact details.
So the bot the thing is along the bottom axis is the amount of power that’s used, so the more to the right. The line goes, that means more power is being used, and obviously we want things to be more to the left so that you have less power being used and also the upward side. The other axis is about the performance, so higher performance will be higher up. The graph, so anything that’s in the bottom right hand corner, would be something that’s not very fast and uses lots of power something’s in the top left hand, corner would be super efficient and yet high performance, and so you can see there that that area in the Top left hand corner is currently empty, there’s nothing plotted in that area, because that is where you get the highest performance at the highest energy, and that is where nuvia are trying to aim for that’s the area they’re saying they want to hit higher performance at a Lower energy consumption, so if you look quickly again at the overall thing here, we’ve got the snapdragon 865.
You can see that red line, so we’ve got so not very much power being used which, as you want in a smartphone, but the performance isn’t as great as, for example, the apple a13, and that was offering greater performance. But it did use more power. And then, if you go along the graph, you can see, for example, uh other chips from intel and from amd that are on there and they are offering similar types of performance but of course, by using more power. So if nuvia actually developed processors in that top left hand corner, which is what they were promising and then qualcomm have obviously validated that, because they’re spending a lot of money to buy this company, then that’s pretty exciting.
For what we’re going to see for snapdragon process. In the future, now at the moment, snapdragon processors use a cpu cores designed by arm itself. Now companies are allowed to buy an architectural license from arm and say we want to design our own cpu calls, but we promise it will be 100 compatible with your architecture and, in fact, there’s some testing that goes on to make sure they are compatible now. Apple. Have one of those architectural licenses and all of those apple uh cores that you find in the iphones are ones apple have designed, but they’ve they guarantee they are 100 compatible with arms architecture.
Now qualcomm also have one of those architectural licenses and they’ve used it in the past, but for the last few generations, they’ve been using a core designed by arm itself and now with the purchase of nuvia. They have a second license because they both have two licenses. Now which allow them to design their own cpu cores, so a future snapdragon process will of course, keep the adreno gpu.
It would keep. Uh qualcomm was designed by call coming. Of course it would keep qualcomm’s ai platform. It would keep qualcomm’s isp. It would keep everything that qualcomm currently designs itself in-house. However, it would replace the arm designed cpu core with the cpu core designed by its new team, now that it’s acquired with nuvia now nuvia technology, of course, is based on the experience that gerard the williams iii had over at apple and over arm before that, and Those other guys that we looked at all their experience at google, their experience at apple, so all these technology, all the things they’ve learned will now be used to bring to fruition this new cpu design, that’s greater performance and yet with higher power efficiency, and then qualcomm Can then put that in a new snapdragon processor, and that would mean for the first time that samsung and qualcomm and media tech and all these other people there would be very much differences between them. For example, in the samsung you’ll be getting the amd uh gpu, whereas over here in qualcomm, you’d be getting kind of. You know the nuvia cpu and the adreno gpu and then mediatek as we know things at the moment they might have the arm uh cpu design, along with the r mali gpu.
So things really will be quite different in terms of the industry in the different things that people offer performance in terms of cpu and gpu, and so on. Now, when will we all see? That, of course, is the key question now. The idea from what i’ve understood is that nuvia were getting close to producing a processor for uh servers, maybe sometime during this year 2021, so obviously taking that technology and putting into a snapdragon is not a five minute job. So i’m estimating two years so i’m saying two years from now.
Maybe they might be to reduce that little bit if they’re going to do a snapdragon launches in december, we’re now in february so maybe a year one and three quarter years. Something like that! Maybe not we’ll see, but if in two years time the snapdragons could be using the new uh nuvia cores it’d be interesting to see it even quicker. But i don’t know whether that will be possible, but one thing is, for certain things are not going to stay. The same qualcomm, samsung they’re all moving in their own directions, doing their own thing to try to differentiate themselves from their competition and that’s good for us as consumers, because it means we get choice, choice in terms of price choices in terms of power, efficiency, choice in Terms of overall performance and, of course also, it means that these processes go into all other kinds of areas like i said automotive, and so on. Talking of that, let’s read some of the comments that the industry leaders, like microsoft, said when they found out about the purchase of calcon purchasing nuvia. This is from microsoft.
It’S exciting to see. Nuvia join the qualcomm team moving forward. We have an incredible opportunity to empower our customers across the windows ecosystem, so clearly they’re a hint of the arm-powered laptops that we have currently today, like the surface pro x, uh coming into a whole new level of performance and efficiency, uh, so laptops with armpits in There wouldn’t windows on arm uh when the new qualcomm processors come out and of course this won’t just be for smartphones, so there will be a qualcomm snapdragon processors like there are today for laptops.
So today you’ve got the eight cx, which is the laptops, so we’d have a new generation, but with the nuvia cpu design in it acer, similar kind of sentiment together with qualcomm, we have delivered a new generation of thin and light always connected pcs, so again, they’re The idea of uh the windowsill laptops really competing now with the arm, based max that we’re seeing apple, of course, are transitioning completely over to arm-based uh cpus. And the idea is that corcoran wants to be able to match that in terms of uh processors. But now using the design from nuvia, because it’s not only about laptops, we are still talking about smartphones asus.
For example, we have had the pleasure of collaborating with qualcomm for many years to deliver premium smartphones such as our flagship, rog gaming phone, we’re excited for the future of our partnership as qualcomm advances and expands its portfolio and capabilities and from oneplus. We are excited to hear qualcomm will be extending their industry-leading snapdragon mobile platform by acquiring the world-class cpu team at nuvia. So clearly everything that qualcomm does today, that is smartphones and laptops and automotive, and so on, will be impacted by this new cpu design. As it goes into everything from smartphones and up to pcs, who knows even a desktop pc running windows would be quite an interesting idea, but with an arm based processor inside of it and that’s all possible now because of this purchase.
Okay, that’s it! I really hope you enjoyed this summary, so you understand what’s coming down the pipeline in a few years time from uh qualcomm because of this purchase of uh nuvi. If you did enjoy this video, please do give it a thumbs up. Can i recommend that you sign up to the gary explains newsletter, as well as the other android authority newsletters, because that will keep you up to date in your inbox, with all the things that we are getting up to go over to android authority, dot com, slash Newsletters to sign up there also don’t please don’t trust the youtube recommendation algorithm. It doesn’t work very well, sorry youtube it doesn’t best thing to do is to subscribe and hit that bell: notification, icon and then you’ll know.
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