Intensifying competition in the global technology business landscape, Qualcomm to acquire chip startup Nuvia in a deal of worth $1.4 billion. Qualcomm decision to acquire Nuvia is viewed by analysts is primarily to challenge Apple and Intel.
The Nuvia’s processors would power across Qualcomm’s flagship products including smartphones, laptops, and infotainment and driver-assistance systems.
Nuvia is founded by three of Apple’s former top semiconductor executives in charge of iPhone chips, Nuvia has been working on a custom CPU core design that it had said would be used in server chips.
The deal marks a big push by Qualcomm would help to re-establish it’s position in chip performance . Nuvia founders Gerard Williams III, John Bruno, Manu Gulati, and their employees will be joining Qualcomm.
Qualcomm has the ready to broad use of Nuvia’s processors, saying they would power flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, infotainment systems, and driver-assistance systems among other applications.
While laptop makers have traditionally turned to Intel for processors, Qualcomm has been supplying PC chips for several years to firms such as Samsung and Microsoft.
“It’s exciting to see Nuvia join the Qualcomm team,” Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, said in a statement on the deal. “Moving forward, we have an incredible opportunity to empower our customers across the Windows ecosystem.” Sources said, Nuvia has been developing custom CPU core design for servers.
This deal is quiet important for Qualcomm, reason being most of Qualcomm’s current chips use computing cores licensed directly from Arm, while Nuvia’s cores use Arm’s underlying architecture but are custom designs.
For Qualcomm, using more custom core designs – a move that Apple has also made – could lower some licensing costs to Arm in the short term and make it easier to move to a rival architecture in the longer term.
