Qualcomm brought a company named Nuvia, which are ex-Apple engineers that help designed the M series Apple silicon chips to produce Oryon which exceeds Apple’s M2 Max in single threaded benchmarks.
Though the impression I get is that this is for Laptops, imagine having a phone with this power, a foldable would make sense.
As a Linux user, I’ve been following the development of Asahi Linux (Linux on the M series MacBooks) with this new development there’s some exciting times to come.
I have so many questions for what this could mean for the market:
- What will these processors cost compared to the ones we are buying today?
- What market segments will show availability? Are they going to be premium only or widely available even on low-cost models?
- Will the bootloaders be unlockable? Will we finally get official Linux support for an Arm SOC in a laptop form factor?
- Can Windows x86 emulation provide the same great user experience of Rosetta 2?
IMO 4th point is very important. For both linux and windows, they need to get that right for immediate transition requirements to ARM.
All the performance is great, but when I get my first ARM laptop almost everything I want to run is going to be x86. It must perform acceptably with today’s applications to be a viable alternative.
Apple has already proven that emulation can be sufficiently good that a casual user won’t notice the difference. If Microsoft is smart this will be a requirement.
I want to download and execute a utility written for Windows XP on Intel and forget that I’m even using ARM. If you tell the user his favorite app won’t work, he will buy a different laptop.
Apple lawsuit incoming in 5, 4, 3…
