At the recently held Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple released the M2 processor and the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air equipped with the chip. The Apple M2 adopts the second-generation 5nm process technology and is equipped with more than 20 billion transistors, which is 25% more than the M1 chip. It can provide a unified memory bandwidth of more than 100GB/s. In addition, it also uses an 8-core CPU + 10-core GPU. Compared with the previous generation, it has increased by 18% and 35% respectively.

Previously, in order to replace the Intel chips in Mac products, Apple launched the M1 self-developed computer chip, and now Apple has released the M2 chip, which is Apple's first upgrade in the field of self-developed computer chips, but the M1 chip uses the first-generation 5nm process. , Although M2 uses the second-generation 5-nanometer process, it is still in the 5-nanometer range, so it will make the outside world have the idea of ??"unfinished business".

When will Apple's M-series chips enter the sub-5nm process? Before Apple's official announcement, chip design giant Qualcomm has come out to "call out".

Qualcomm wants to lead PC CPU market, beat Apple's M2 chip

According to the latest survey by TrendForce, Qualcomm is the world's largest IC design company. In the first quarter of this year, with the help of the mobile phone, RF front-end department, and the Internet of Things and automotive departments, Qualcomm's revenue reached 9.55 billion US dollars, an annual increase of 52%. The world's first.

At the same time, Qualcomm is also actively developing the PC market. Recently, Qualcomm CEO An Meng said that the company's goal is to establish a leadership position in the PC CPU market and to beat Apple's M2 chip.

Ming-Chi Kuo, the industry's "Breakthrough God", revealed that Qualcomm will mass-produce a chip code-named Hamoa in the third quarter of next year, using TSMC's 4-nanometer process to compete with Apple's M2.

In the PC market, although Qualcomm has long provided Snapdragon processor products using the Arm architecture, its influence is not as strong as products using the x86 architecture. When Apple's M-series chips, which also use the Arm architecture, came out and achieved good market response, Qualcomm saw the prospects of Arm architecture chips in the PC market.

In 2021, Qualcomm acquired the chip company NUVIA for $1.4 billion. The company is committed to developing high-performance chips with Arm architecture. The founder, Gerard Williams III, worked for Apple for 9 years and is one of Apple's most important chip designers. In addition The two co-founders, John Bruno and Manu Gulati, were also former Apple semiconductor executives.

The industry speculates that the upcoming Hamoa chip will be operated by the Qualcomm Nuvia team, which will help Qualcomm better compete with Apple in the PC chip market.

However, Apple's M-series chips are also constantly improving. Recently, the industry broke the news that Apple will launch the M2 Pro chip before the end of this year, using a 3-nanometer chip, the CPU core will be increased to 12 cores, and the GPU will be more powerful. In addition, Apple is still preparing the M3 chip, which also uses a 3-nanometer process, and is expected to be taped out in the third quarter of next year.

Status threatened, how does Intel fight back?

At present, the processor market is dominated by two architectures, X86 and Arm. Among them, x86 is a complex instruction set architecture, which dominates the desktop and server processor market. Intel is the overlord of x86 architecture; Arm architecture is a simplified instruction set architecture. , Samsung, Huawei, Nvidia and other support, dominate the mobile processor market.

The launch of Apple's M-series chips has activated the Arm-based desktop processor market, and with the future development of Qualcomm Nuvia, Intel's desktop processor market share may be affected to some extent.

At the same time, the Arm architecture is also growing in the server market. According to a survey by TrendForce, it is estimated that the penetration rate of Arm-based servers will reach 22% by 2025, and cloud data centers will be the first to adopt them.

Intel missed the Arm-led mobile ecological era before, and now facing the "threat" of Arm architecture in the PC and server fields, Intel has begun to fight back and joined the reduced instruction set architecture RISC-V camp.

Tom's Hardware reported that Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center recently jointly stated that the two sides will invest up to 400 million euros to jointly establish a laboratory, mainly used to develop RISC-V-based processors to support high-performance computing (HPC) systems, And specialized chips for artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.

Although RISC-V is not as popular as the X86 and Arm architectures, RISC-V is a free open source instruction set architecture and has received support from many high-tech companies. In addition to Intel, Huawei, ZTE, UNISOC, Alibaba And other companies are also deploying RISC-V.

With chip companies such as Intel joining the RISC-V camp, the RISC-V ecosystem is expected to develop rapidly in the future, and will continue to compete with the X86 and Arm architectures. ‍