Qualcomm has been manufacturing PC chipsets since last year, but its efforts have been quite modest as the majority of them reuse designs from its phone products.
Now, a reliable source has reportedly told GSM Arena, the company is set to finally take the project seriously and release a monstrous desktop CPU. According to the source, it will be unveiled in 2024 and has the codename “Hamoa,” which will be useful for identifying any upcoming leaks regarding the chip.
The 12 CPU cores on the Hamoa chip are arranged in an 8+4 arrangement. While the large cluster comprises eight performance cores, the four-core cluster consists of cores that are energy-efficient. According to GSM Arena, the CPU will also support independent GPUs.
Based on reports, Qualcomm would use the Phoenix core architecture from Nuvia, which was developed by former Apple workers who worked on the company’s current ARM-based Apple CPUs.
It’s not surprising that Qualcomm will employ the new architecture given that the business recently acquired the Nuvia start-up, which promised a 50–100% performance gain within a 5-watt per core constraint. That is, of course, based on the relevant data from 2020.
In any case, according to GSM Arena, the performance is “very promising” and might lead to a true ARM-based Windows experience in the coming years.