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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

The former Apple M1 team is now at Qualcomm/Nuvia, so expect M1-equivalent Windows Arm laptops "soon".

This is a huge overstatement. A few engineers went to Qualcomm, not the "Apple M1 team." Market forces at work. However, I do suspect they will help Qualcomm come closer to being competitive. How close they will get in performance remains to be seen. The M2 is already about 20% faster with the same number of cores.

Qualcomm paid $1.4 billion for Nuvia, they must have hired more engineers and/or invented new IP.

https://www.androidauthority.com/qualcomm-nuvia-1192440/

> Nuvia was founded back in 2019 by former Apple silicon executive Gerard Williams III, along with Manu Gulati and John Bruno. Williams was the chief architect behind several major Apple CPUs and chipsets from 2010 to 2019 .. the Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane, Monsoon, Vortex, Lightning and Firestorm CPUs. These CPUs were featured in the Apple A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12 series, A13, and A14 respectively. The Nuvia founder’s profile also notes that he was the chief architect for Apple’s Mac hardware ... Going back even futher, the Nuvia co-founder worked at Arm from 1998 to 2010, working on CPU tech like the Arm Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A15 CPU cores.

> Qualcomm paid $1.4 billion for Nuvia, they must have hired more engineers and/or invented new IP.

This assumes that valuation is rational. It is not, and recent history is full of companies over-paying or under-paying for their acquisitions. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and the pudding will still take a while to get ready.

The promised M1-level performance on chips that ship at the end of 2023. So, they'd initially still be three years behind Apple.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar...

M1 is a fixed target, everyone will get there eventually. For example, AFAIK Intel has plans to have something competitive with the M1 in terms of performance per watt at some point in 2023. The question is whether Qualcomm will be able to get where Apple will be at that time, because nobody will care about “M1-equivalent” in 2 years.

And yeah, Nuvia is more “a handful of engineers” (though quite good at their job) than “the former Apple M1 team”. It took Apple billions upon billions and the better part of a decade. These things are very long term plans, and at this scale it depends at least as much on high-level strategies than on engineering.

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