Today, Qualcomm is announcing that the company has completed the acquisition of NUVIA, a startup company comprised of industry veterans who were behind the creation of Apple’s high-performance CPU cores and who intended to break the server market with a new core performance called “Phoenix”.
The acquisition was announced just a few weeks ago, in mid-January, so the whole process was extremely fast in terms of schedule.
“Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced that its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., has completed the acquisition of world-class CPU and technology design company, NUVIA for $ 1.4 billion before working capital and others settings.”
Today, Qualcomm went so far as to present a concrete roadmap for new SoCs using the newly acquired IP from Nuvia:
“The first Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms to feature Qualcomm’s new internally designed CPUs are due to be tested in the second half of 2022 and will be designed for high-performance ultraportable laptops. “
Sampling in late 2022 would require a tape-out in early 2022, and design-in essentially as soon as possible after the acquisition today. The whole process looks extremely fast and aggressive in terms of time, pointing out that Qualcomm is putting a lot of emphasis on the project.
Qualcomm has shown many positive reactions to the Apple M1. I quote our interview with Alex Katouzian in December in terms of his reaction to the competitor’s design:
“[…] laptops today are really moving to mobile. The camera is super important. Audio is super important. Battery life is super important. Not having a fan is super important. Portability, reduced thickness, connectivity, always on, always connected, all these features of the phone are changing to the PC.
And people say that imitation is the best form of flattery. Look what happened to the [Apple] M1. Your pitch is almost a duplicate of what we’ve been saying for the past two or three years. “
The rapid acquisition of NUVIA and the immediate disclosure of plans to address the market for high-performance ultraportable laptops can be seen as Qualcomm’s direct response to the new Apple M1 laptops and to compete with its high-performance CPU cores.
Article update:
We had the opportunity to chat with Keith Kressin, SVP and GM, Qualcomm’s Edge Cloud and Computing, answering several questions about the company’s current plans for the NUVIA team. Qualcomm sees the acquisition as an important strategic addition to the company’s design capabilities, bridging a gap in IP design where the company had been relying on external IP for many years, such as Arm’s Cortex cores. Keith made an important observation about this ability to have total internal control of the project over each IP block in a SoC, allowing the company better flexibility to respond to market demands and create competitive products.
The immediate goals of the NUVIA team will be to implement custom CPU cores in Snapdragon SoCs for Windows notebooks and allow the company to offer higher-performance CPUs than would otherwise be possible. When asked about plans for other product stacks and the possibility of using both internal CPUs, as well as continuing to use Arm Cortex CPU IP for lower segments, it was stated that Qualcomm will continue to evaluate each metric and choose the best fit design that makes more sense for that product category.
We asked the team if Qualcomm would continue to invest in NUVIA’s original plans to enter the server and enterprise market, with an answer that this was not the primary objective or motivation of the acquisition, that Qualcomm, however, would keep that as an option. for the future and let the NUVIA team explore these possibilities. Here, Keith acknowledged that it is a difficult market to beat and that Qualcomm has not yet made final decisions in terms of long-term planning.