Qualcomm moved its Snapdragon designers to its ARM server chip. We peek at the results Qualcomm moved engineers from its flagship Snapdragon chips, used in millions of smartphones and tablets, to its fledgling data center processor family Centriq. This shift in focus, from building the brains of handheld devices to concentrating on servers, will be apparent on Tuesday evening, when the internal design of Centriq …
There isn't anyone on the Android side able to beat ARM designed A72/A73/A75 cores by enough to matter. Sure, Apple is blowing away those ARM designed cores, but Android users aren't going to switch to iPhone over CPU performance, so that's irrelevant to Qualcomm.
Interesting choice to go with 48 cores. I guess they know they can't compete with Intel in single thread performance / IPC, so there's no point in clocking aggressively high and will instead try to make up for it with the number of cores. Sort of like AMD's strategy with Threadripper.
I'm sure the big cloud providers like Google and Amazon will give them a look, but they have such large scale these days they could afford to fund their own ARM design and create a complete SoC that does everything they need it to do and nothing they don't. So I wonder if there's really ever going to be a large enough market to justify Qualcomm designing an ARM server CPU.
Sorry to be picky but you're comment about ARM vs Intel holds just as true for ARM vs Apple: tweaking performance of the ARM designs doesn't make much difference to overall performance. Where Apple still has an undeniable lead is in the GPUs and in the custom hardware that the ARM design encourages.
Except that's not true. Amazon acquired Annapurna Labs back in 2015 specifically for that purpose.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/198140-amazon-buys-secretive-chip-maker-annapurna-labs-for-350-million
And google released their own custom "TPU" for AI processing earlier this year. While it's not a general purpose CPU, it could very easily be converted.
IF they follow some of their current licensing practices then the servers that contain these CPU's cost some more dure to QC wanting to charge a percentage of the Server cost as a license as well as a license to use the chip in the first place.
Double dipping at its best.
It doesn't seem like Kyro is that critical to their mobile roadmap if they can swap out their fully custom design for off-the-shelf IP without any obvious impact on the bottom line, yet it's undoubtedly a damn sight cheaper/faster to use the off the shelf ARM cores.
I always thought Kyro was a case of NIH, and never really justified the additional design cost given the marginal performance gain over stock ARM IP.
At best Kyro is just a dick swinging marketing exercise - no real gain or benefit for the end user, but look how clever we are to design our own stuff.
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