It's hard to imagine why they'd distract themselves with that, except perhaps with a token small-run demo for pure brand marketing purposes.
Because of Apple's strict vertical integration, there's so much market for them as the de facto manufacturer delivering parts to pretty much every competitor making products that want a high performance/power ratio.
I believe they have three options
1. Say it’s meant to be like an iGPU, and work on supporting dGPUs to complement it.
2. Say that they want to compete with dGPUs/Apple and risk losing their mobile crown. Which is what Apple did in exchange for one design across all products.
3. Say they want to have a split product portfolio. A more desktop focused GPU for Snapdragon X with a more mobile centric one for 8xx
If they can give good enough, on par or better with current iGPUs, with a lower power usage and potentially even fanless, they're going to sell a billion of them. They'll be in every Chromebook in the world.
I agree these likely will take over the sub $1000 market if given the chance but they are shooting at $1500-2000
Perhaps they'll expand into both ends like they do phones, eg the 4xx on the low end and 8xx on the high end.
All their comparisons are to the MacBook Air and mid-high end windows laptops because that’s the market they’re gunning for. These are meant to be $1k-2k devices.
So I tend to agree that being the reference mobile SoC vendor outside of Cupertino is pretty on brand for their absolute top priority. At Qualcomm if it doesn’t make dollars it doesn’t make sense as we used to say.
And good for them! After a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a pure play CDMA patent troll they seem to have gotten back to their roots and started doing engineering again. It’s a cool company.
haven't google and samsung started making their own socs?