Qualcomm completed the acquisition of silicon design company Nuvia for $ 1.4 billion, a move that will lead to Qualcomm’s internal CPU designs. The acquisition is expected to allow Qualcomm to compete with Apple’s silicon division and focus on launching bigger and better ARM chips in the laptop market. The deal was announced in January 2021.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Nuvia; the company was only founded in 2019 and never made a product. Nuvia was focused on building server chips, but Qualcomm seems primarily interested in the engineering pedigree here, as the company was founded by three senior engineers from Apple’s silicon division. Nuvia’s CEO, Gerard Williams, a former chief CPU architect at Apple for nearly a decade, is now senior vice president of engineering at Qualcomm.
Apple is notoriously in the process of discarding Intel x86 CPUs to implement internal ARM architecture designs across all lines of the company’s laptops and desktops. Qualcomm wants to be here to sell chips to all PC vendors who want to follow suit. The Qualcomm press release immediately directed its new design feature to the market that Apple is raising, saying, “The first Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms to feature the new CPUs designed internally by Qualcomm Technologies are due to be tested in the second half of 2022 and will be designed for high performance ultra-portable laptops. “The caveat that this acquisition will lead to” internally designed CPUs “is big business, as Qualcomm currently supplies only slightly customized, ready-to-use ARM CPUs.
Apple’s ARM cores are industry leaders due to the strength of the company’s CPU designs. While Apple uses the ARM architecture, the company provides fully customized internal CPU designs. Qualcomm’s SoC CPUs can be renamed “Qualcomm Kryo CPUs”, but they never deviate too much from ARM’s commercially available CPU designs. The company’s main laptop chip, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2, uses ARM Cortex A76 CPU cores. The top smartphone chip, the Snapdragon 888, uses an ARM Cortex X1 core and Cortex A78 cores.
Coming out of the shadow of ARM
Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon says the acquisition will enable Qualcomm to develop “differentiated products with leading CPU performance and energy efficiency”. Currently, Qualcomm’s differentiation in the SoC market depends mainly on its modem technologies (hence the frantic promotion of the 5G company), its Adreno GPU division (which was ATI’s Imageon division before it was acquired in 2009) and its aggressive scheme patent licensing, which blocks competitors. Having a quality CPU design house would complete the company very well.
ARM’s CPU designs are used basically on all types of computing devices on the planet: servers, smartphones, tablets, laptops, cars, IoT products, maybe one or two desktops and a million other things. Having to rotate so many plates at the same time means that ARM has to be more general than you might prefer if you’re trying to compete with a laser-focused CPU design house like Apple.
An easily accessible area is the low-power CPU cores that regularly come in Qualcomm SoCs. State-of-the-art ARM chips generally have a “big.LITTLE” design, with a set of four faster, more powerful chips for foreground processing and a set of four slower, lower power cores for background processing and work on hold. The higher power cores are updated every year, but the lower power cores are updated only every four years. The Cortex A53 was the low-energy solution for 2012-2016, and today the old Cortex A55 cores, from 2017, are still marketed on the Snapdragon 888 and 8cx Gen2. If you suddenly find yourself with more CPU design features, putting energy-efficient parts at an annual cadence seems like a good place to start.
Even under the constraints of ready-to-use ARM designs, laptop SoCs have long been a consideration in Qualcomm’s line. The company’s flagship SoC for 2021 Snapdragon 888 smartphones is a cutting-edge design based on the latest ARM X1 / A78 design and built on the latest 5 nm manufacturing process, but Qualcomm’s laptop chips are two generations behind the designs of smartphones. The current Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 laptop SoC was announced just three months before the Snapdragon 888, but the combination of an ARM Cortex A76 CPU and a 7 nm manufacturing process makes it equivalent to the Snapdragon 855, a smartphone SoC launched in 2019 .
The current design of the ARM X1 has met the demands for a larger, more powerful ARM chip. On the one hand, it is a pity that Qualcomm did not introduce the chip in the laptop’s SoC in a timely manner, as it seems to be the right direction for a laptop. On the other hand, the X1 is a good example of how Qualcomm would not be competitive if it depended on an ARM design roadmap. Again, ARM is a generalist, and “Bigger and more powerful” for ARM is still not bigger and more powerful enough to compete with Apple. The Cortex X1 2021-based Snapdragon 888 cannot yet compete with the 2020 Apple A14 Bionic in CPU benchmarks, let alone the top-of-the-line Apple M1 chip. ARM is simply not producing designs with Apple’s laptop and desktop power goals.
Although laptops are Qualcomm’s first target, the company does not stop there. The Qualcomm press release says the company “expects to integrate next generation CPUs into a broad product portfolio, including smartphones, laptops and digital cockpits, as well as advanced driver assistance systems, extended reality and infrastructure network solutions” . This statement seems to neglect specifically smartwatches and desktops, but it is a start.