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Today, Qualcomm announced that it will acquire NUVIA for $ 1.4 billion – acquiring the startup company comprised of industry veterans who were originally behind the creation of Apple’s high-performance CPU cores. The transaction has important ramifications for Qualcomm’s future in high-performance computing in both the mobile and laptop segments, with a possible re-entry into the server market.
NUVIA was originally founded in February 2019 and went out of stealth in November of that year. The start-up was founded by industry veterans Gerard Williams III, John Bruno and Manu Gulati, with extensive industry experience at Google, Apple, Arm, Broadcom and AMD.
Gerard Williams III in particular was the chief architect for more than a decade at Apple, having been the lead architect on all Apple CPU designs right up to the Lightning core on the A13 – with the latest Apple A14 and Apple M1 Firestorm cores , possibly also having been in the pipeline under his direction.
NUVIA was able to recruit and recruit many industry talents from various CPU design teams across the industry and planned to enter the high performance computing and enterprise market with a new server SoC with a new CPU core dubbed “Phoenix” .
NUVIA, in particular, made aggressive claims about how its project would be able to significantly outperform the competition, both in raw performance and in energy efficiency, once it reached the market – normally, such claims should always be taken with skepticism, in the However, due to the team and talent project members having proven themselves in the form of Apple’s highly successful CPU microarchitecture, there is much more weight and credibility in them compared to other startups.
As a new entity in the industry, the company has always had an uphill battle against established giants, so while they might have talent and technology, it is not a guarantee that they would succeed in business. I admit that during the initial announcement of the company in 2019 I thought to myself that it was possible that the team was looking to be acquired by another great player, which ended up happening today.
Qualcomm’s gains and possibilities
Qualcomm’s purchase of the entire company for $ 1.4 billion can be seen as an endorsement of NUVIA’s talent and claims, and can mark a major shift in the industry, broadly expanding the possibilities of the combined entities compared to how were separate entities.
From Qualcomm’s perspective, it’s a bittersweet business that follows the company’s failed Centriq business, which in 2018 suffered critical scams and cancellations as the company had to cut costs and fire a significant number of people in its data center unit.
At the time, Qualcomm still maintained a custom CPU microarchitecture team for server SoCs, having, a few years earlier, abandoned its efforts on custom CPUs for mobile devices, given the more efficient and efficient PPA (performance, power, area) advantages best of Arm do Cortex licensable cores. Eventually, the design teams failed over the years, leaving Qualcomm no longer able to design custom CPU microarchitectures, and it has never been more competitive.
Qualcomm’s acquisition of NUVIA gives them the opportunity to take advantage of the initial start-up work in the server space, possibly reinvigorating the company’s ambitions in the server space and giving them a second chance in the market.
In addition, the change also has greater repercussions in the consumer space, with Qualcomm claiming that NUVIA CPU designs should be deployed in major next generation mobile SoCs and laptops, as well as in other industrial applications such as digital cockpits and ADAS.
In essence, Qualcomm is looking to leverage NUVIA CPUs to replace the current Armx Cortex CPU IP and gain a competitive advantage in terms of performance. This is an important point in the transaction, as it means that Qualcomm is confident that NUVIA’s designs and CPU roadmap will be competitive or exceed Arm’s offerings and will invest money and investment towards these goals.
There are also two more aspects to Qualcomm’s consideration of the purchase: with Nvidia’s plans to acquire Arm Holdings announced last September, this would give Qualcomm an important level of independence and security from its future product roadmaps – only in in case Nvidia makes substantial changes to the CPU IP licensing model.
Second, Apple’s recent move to abandon the x86 in favor of its own Arm-based Apple Silicon SoCs, starting with the new Apple M1 and planning to make a complete product transition in the next 2 years, has greatly boosted Arm’s ecosystem. . Although Qualcomm has so far released laptop-specific Snapdragon designs, they still rely on Arm’s Cortex CPU IP and currently cannot compete with Apple’s silicon. In essence, Qualcomm could be seeing this as a big long-term gamble in trying to establish itself as Arm’s de facto silicon supplier in this market segment, and an alternative to Apple’s silicon products. In the past, NUVIA had commented that this would be a possible long-term goal beyond its focus on server space; however, the acquisition by Qualcomm now greatly accelerates these plans.
Press release:
SAN DIEGO, January 13, 2021 / PRNewswire / – Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced that its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire NUVIA for approximately $ 1.4 billion before working capital and other adjustments. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended.
NUVIA comprises a world-class proven CPU and technology design team, with industry-leading experience in high-performance processors, Systems on a Chip (SoC) and power management for computing-intensive devices and applications. The addition of NUVIA CPUs to Qualcomm Technologies’ already leading mobile graphics processing unit (GPU), AI engine, DSP and dedicated multimedia accelerators will further expand the leadership of Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms and position Snapdragon as the preferred platform for the future of connected computing.
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NUVIA CPUs are expected to be integrated into Qualcomm Technologies’ broad product portfolio, powering smartphones, next-generation laptops and digital cockpits, as well as advanced driver assistance systems, extended reality and infrastructure network solutions.
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As part of the transaction, the founders of NUVIA, Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati and John Bruno, and their employees will join Qualcomm.
“Leadership in CPU performance will be critical in defining and delivering the next era of computing innovation,” said Gerard Williams, CEO of NUVIA. “The combination of NUVIA and Qualcomm will bring together the best talent, technology and engineering resources in the industry to create a new class of high-performance computing platforms that will set the standard for our industry. We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities that we have ahead of us. “