Enlarge / The TSMC facility in Phoenix, Arizona. (credit: The Washington Post / Contributor | The Washington Post )

The US Department of Commerce has proposed another round of CHIPS Act funding up to $6.6 billion for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which President Joe Biden hopes will "support the construction of leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing facilities right here in the United States."

With this award—which includes additional funding up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans—TSMC has agreed to increase funding in Arizona fabrication plants to $65 billion. That's the largest foreign direct investment in a new project in US history, the Commerce Department said, and it will fuel construction of TSMC's third Arizona fab.

According to Biden, "these facilities will manufacture the most advanced chips in the world," putting the US "on track to produce 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors by 2030."

Enlarge / Qualcomm's XR reference device. (credit: Qualcomm)

The Apple Vision Pro is coming out sometime in early 2024, and since it is a VR/AR headset that runs iOS apps, Team Android would like to have a competitor available. Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm vaguely announced a mixed-reality partnership a year ago, which would have Qualcomm building chips, Google building software, and Samsung shipping products. Step 1 of this partnership has been announced: The Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ SoC , which will power many of these headsets from Samsung and others.

Perhaps more interesting than the individual specs of Qualcomm's chip is all the partner talk surrounding the launch. Samsung says it's "thrilled to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies and Google in revolutionizing the mobile industry once more" and promises a "best-in-class XR experience for Galaxy users." Google is promising an "immersive and spatial XR" experience based on Android. Qualcomm is making a reference headset design based on the chip and says at least five companies have hardware in development, including Samsung, Google, HTC, Immersed , and Play for Dream.

A few specs for the XR2+ Gen 2 (credit: Qualcomm)

The XR2+ Gen 2 is an upgrade over the XR2 Gen 2 (non-plus) that came out in 2023 and shipped in the Meta Quest 3 . The most significant difference is a bump in resolution, with the plus model supporting "4.3K" resolution per eye at 90 fps. The old chip only did 3K by 3K. The resolution of these headsets is critical, not just because games will look nicer, but if you're trying to display a virtual desktop and read text, you're pushing the resolution limits of current headsets.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm's Nuvia-designed Arm chip for PCs is easily the company's most exciting announcement today, but it also announced a phone chip: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This will show up in most flagship Android devices in 2024 and promises around 30 percent performance improvements while picking from Arm's parts bin.

First up is a new "1:5:2" core arrangement. Instead of the usual one big core, three medium cores, and four small cores (for single-threaded performance, multi-core, and background processing, respectively), the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has one big core, five medium cores, and two small cores. Qualcomm says the big core is a 3.3 GHz Arm Cortex X4 but didn't confirm any of the other CPU core model numbers. Those five medium cores don't all run at the same frequency, with three running at 3.2 GHz and two at 3.0 GHz. The CPU performance claims are 30 percent faster and 20 percent more efficient. The chip is built on a 4 nm process.

Qualcomm is always light on the GPU details (even though it is one of the strengths of a Qualcomm chip), and this year, the Adreno GPU doesn't even have a model number in the documentation Qualcomm sent over. It is supposed to be 25 percent faster and 25 percent more efficient, though. Qualcomm talked up the lighting capabilities of the chip for video games, with support for Unreal Engine 5 Lumen and better ray tracing.

Enlarge / Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite could be the first Arm chip that can do for PCs what Apple Silicon did for Macs. (credit: Qualcomm)

For years, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon chips for Windows PCs, and for years, those chips' performance have failed to dislodge Intel's or AMD's chips to any significant degree. Its latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (and the closely related Microsoft SQ3) appears in just two consumer PCs, the cumbersomely named Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with 5G and Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 .

But that may be changing. Nearly three years ago, Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was mainly working on server processors, but the company's founders and many of its employees had also been involved in developing the A- and M-series Apple Silicon processors that have all enabled the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to achieve their enviable blend of performance and battery life. Today, Qualcomm is formally announcing the fruit of the Nuvia acquisition: the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core, 4 nm chip that will compete directly with Intel's Core processors and AMD Ryzen chips in PCs—and, less directly, Apple's M2 and M3-series processors for Macs.

Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Elite will begin arriving in PCs starting in mid-2024. The company has also announced a new Snapdragon SoC for smartphones, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 .

Enlarge / A teaser image for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X SoCs. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm's annual " Snapdragon Summit " is coming up later this month, and the company appears ready to share more about its long-planned next-generation Arm processor for PCs. The company hasn't shared many specifics yet, but yesterday we finally got a name: " Snapdragon X, " which is coming in 2024, and it may finally do for Arm-powered Windows PCs what Apple Silicon chips did for Macs a few years ago (though it's coming a bit later than Qualcomm had initially hoped ).

Qualcomm has been making chips for PCs for years, most recently the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (you might also know it as the Microsoft SQ3, which is what the chip is called in Surface devices). But those chips have never quite been fast enough to challenge Intel's Core or AMD's Ryzen CPUs in mainstream laptops. Any performance deficit is especially noticeable because many people will run at least a few apps designed for the x86 version of Windows, code which needs to be translated on the fly for Arm processors.

So why will Snapdragon X be any different? It's because these will be the first chips borne of Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia in 2021 . Nuvia was founded and staffed by quite a few key personnel from Apple's chipmaking operation, the team that had already upended a small corner of the x86 PC market by designing the Apple M1 and its offshoots. Apple had sued Nuvia co-founder and current Qualcomm engineering SVP Gerard Williams for poaching Apple employees, though the company dropped the suit without comment earlier this year.