The AI PC jointly launched by Microsoft and Qualcomm is changing the PC market, potentially ending Intel's dominance. However, at this moment, ARM and Qualcomm have torn apart their relationship, potentially leading to mutual harm and uncovering the truth about Chinese chips as assembled chips. Why is this happening?

In its early years, Qualcomm actually developed its own core chip architecture. It adopted a self-developed core architecture before the Snapdragon 835, but due to MediaTek's multi-core dominance, Qualcomm suffered significant losses. After all, self-developed architectures are difficult to keep up with ARM's pace of updates and upgrades. Therefore, starting with the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm also chose ARM's public core.

This is why many ARM chips are mocked as assembled chips. They all adopt ARM's public core, which allows for rapid iteration. After all, ARM releases a new generation of public cores every year, forcing many ARM chip companies to purchase public core licenses annually, bringing more revenue to ARM.

However, the result of this approach is that many Android chips, including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and many Chinese mobile phone chip companies, are highly homogeneous. Their chips rarely have differentiated performance, with differences mainly in frequency and core count, but the gaps are not significant. More importantly, their approach has led them to consistently lag behind Apple.

Since Qualcomm adopted ARM's public core, Apple is the only global mobile phone chip company that uses a self-developed core architecture. This allows Apple's A-series processors to significantly outperform in single-core performance, while Android chip companies can only enhance multi-core performance by increasing the number of cores.

However, recent generations of Apple's A-series processors have also increased the number of cores to six, rivaling Android chips in multi-core performance while excelling in power consumption. Later, Apple introduced the powerful M-series processors for Macs, the first ARM processor that can compete with Intel's performance. Since then, Android chips have been unable to compete with Apple in terms of performance.

Apple's processor performance advantage has allowed it to occupy a significant share of the high-end mobile phone market with the iPhone, while Macs have a significant market share in the high-end PC market, avoiding fierce price wars. In contrast, Qualcomm, using a public core, has been deeply entrenched in a price war.

To escape the price war, Qualcomm acquired the startup company NUVIA several years ago. The founders of NUVIA come from Apple's A-series processor development team, and the nuvia core they developed is exceptionally performant. It is now used in Qualcomm's PC processor, the Snapdragon X, demonstrating outstanding performance. This is one of the main reasons why Microsoft and Qualcomm, after years of collaboration, have finally made a breakthrough in the PC market.

Qualcomm's adoption of the self-developed nuvia core has displeased ARM. When nuvia was independent, Qualcomm had to pay more licensing fees to purchase ARM's public core, and nuvia also had to pay for the instruction set license. Now, with Qualcomm's acquisition of nuvia, Qualcomm can significantly reduce licensing fees by not using a public core. Moreover, after the acquisition, the two companies have merged into one, only requiring one company to pay the licensing fee, which has displeased ARM.

More importantly, Qualcomm's move to develop an independent architecture that significantly improves performance will encourage MediaTek and Chinese chip companies to strengthen their independent research and development. After all, it has been proven that adopting ARM's public core cannot achieve a leading position in performance, potentially further reducing ARM's revenue. To avoid this situation, ARM has been litigating with Qualcomm, which may even jeopardize the development of AI PCs. However, ARM is willing to do so