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by qwytw 642 days ago
> Their innovation abilities have been lacking

And Qualcomm's haven't? What did they really design besides the Snapdragon X Elite in the last 10+ years?

> but I hope it happens

So more industry concentration and even less competition would somehow be a good thing?

2 comments

> What did they really design besides the Snapdragon X Elite in the last 10+ years?

The Snapdragon 8 series have been the flagship SoCs for non-Apple phones for years, that's why people had high hopes for the Snapdragon X on PCs

Snapdragons have mostly been reference ARM designs with Adreno bolted on being the big selling point, since it blows away Mali or whatever the reference design is today. They got that from AMD of all places, hence the name being an anagram of Radeon.
> The Snapdragon 8 series

They "just" are just using standard ARM cores which is hardly comparable to what Intel and Apple are doing (and they have been lagging behind Apple by a few years since forever; arguably Intel is closer to the M series than Qualcomm is to A series).

> Snapdragon X

I thought it's because they finally designed their own core, since ARM has been completely ignoring the laptop market and couldn't really offer anything?

> What did they really design besides the Snapdragon X Elite in the last 10+ years?

Lots of 5G modems

It's pretty easy to design the best 5G modems when you're are almost (effectively) the only company that's legally allowed to make them. They are basically a monopoly...

Intel would be doing much better as well if they didn't have to share x86 with AMD and could sue ARM into oblivion...

I imagine Apple would disagree.
We'll never really know though, will we? Or are you claiming that the endless patent related lawsuits (going both ways) had no impact on Intel's/Apple's efforts?