Mother of Snapdragons might bite Intel

Next year will see the arrival of ARM based Windows machines and while the beasts have not been that popular in the past, it is expected that this time it will be different.

Empire doomed

It has been said for a while now that Intel’s glorious empire, on which the sun never sets, could be overthrown by barbarians, but so far the chip maker has managed to thrive.

Servers you right, Chipzilla

Qualcomm’s introduction of a top notch 48 core 10nm server chip means that Intel’s milkmaid can no longer serve up expensive milk from its cash cow Xeons and the lot.

Meet the Centriq 2400

There is a company with a hot server SoC based on ARM architecture developed from the ground up that has just announced commercial sampling of the world’s first 10nm 48 Core SoC and guess what that company is called? Qualcomm. So, Qualcomm beats Intel at its own game and managed to announce and sample the world’s first mobile and now server 10nm SoC.

The experiment did not work

The fruity cargo-cult Apple is rumoured to be having second thoughts about its relationship with Intel and is starting to regret its decision to install Intel modems in half its iPhone 7s.

It is finally happening

Telstra in Australia was the first company to launch both 600 Mbps and 1Gbps networks but it looks like T-Mobile in the US plans to launch 1Gbps in 2017 too. 

Could challenge Intel

A joint venture between Qualcomm and China's Guizhou Province is to build ARM-based server silicon by licensing the ARMv-8-A architecture and generally being a pain in the bottom line for Intel.

It will be in Windows 10 in 2017

Microsoft will be rolling out x86 emulation for ARM processors in the Redstone 3 upgrade of Windows 10 late next year.

Can’t have some working better than others

Apple has solved the performance gap between the Intel and Qualcomm modems on the iPhone 7 by disabling some of the Qualcomm X12 modem features so that it performs similarly to the Intel version.

World’s first 10nm SoC is a big deal

Kaby Lake, the third generation 14nm was launched in 2016 and it looks like Cannon Lake 10nm Intel CPU might only launch in late 2017. But it is fairly certain that the Snapdragon 835 mobile SoC is going to ship in the first half of 2017.