I’m by no means an expert in these matters and am happy to be proven wrong, but this article suggests that Qualcomm at least haven’t yet got much to give in response to the M1.
Qualcomm could have announced its plans to take on Apple's M1 with an upcoming Snapdragon Compute chip for Windows on Arm. Instead, the topic was barely mentioned at the company's Snapdragon Technology Summit.
www.pcworld.com
The 888 is a smartphone chip was the primary focus of their tech day. There is one Cortex X1 core there. ( three other 'lessor' bigs , and four small ). If Qualcomm grew the die and swapped in four x1 cores they would have something that is better matched to being a PC processor at the lower end of the ultra-light laptop spectrum. It would not "defeat" the M1, but it would be way better than tossing an overclocked 888 into a PC and calling it a day.
Apple is spending lots of transistor budget on large System cache ( and large l2 caches ) and other stuff. And zero on a 4G/LTE/5G Modem. There is a decent chunk in Qualcomm's chip that Apple just doesn't do right now.
Qualcomm is aimed at a slightly different objective and spot on the PC market.
By the time their response does come out, Apple will no doubt already be moving on to their next generation chip. I’m sure Intel and co will catch up, but they may lose market share in the short term.
"...Having the capability of that 5G PC with the small cells to go into an enterprise is a very, very attractive formula for all of the carriers. So that channel is going to start to open up, Microsoft is 100% behind us as a partner to try to get all of the apps, all of the 64 bit emulations up and running and resolve all these issues. And on top of that, there's Apple who's now in the market and everyone wants to react to it. .... "
www.anandtech.com
Part of the issue is that Qualcomm probably needs someone to step up a firm commitment to buy a large block (i.e., several millions) before they will "fork" too far off of their smartphone target SoC design. That could have been Microsoft. Or it could be another vendor and Microsoft is another partner in the effort.
It wouldn't necssarily take a long time for Qualcomm to ship a variation on the 888 that swapped four Cortex X1 cores.
www.anandtech.com
It just wouldn't be a good smartphone SoC anymore. ( larger and more power consuming when running full out. ). That wouldn't be tech that Qualcomm doesn't have at the moment. It is a different configuration that will make more sense once yields on Samsung's 5nm get incrementally better (for a bigger die product. ).
As long as Qualcomm and others ( Microsoft? ) keep paying ARM to insert a gap between their targeted smartphone cores and the something "better" X-series , that "better" core can start making better inroads against what Apple has been doing.
If all Qualcomm has for the next 9-12 months is warmed over C8X/SQ1/SQ2 then they'll ( and PC market) will have problems.
The PC market probably won't respond to the whole M-series line up. The focal point will probably be concentrated at blunting the MBA as opposed to the other Macs farther up the line up.
