Qualcomm to Acquire NUVIA: A CPU Magnitude Shift
Today Qualcomm has announced they will be acquiring NUVIA for $1.4bn – acquiring the start-up company consisting of industry veterans which originally were behind the creation of Apple's high-performance CPU cores. The transaction has important ramifications for Qualcomm's future in high-performance computing both in mobile, as well as laptop segment, with a possible re-entry into the server market.
NUVIA was originally founded in February 2019 and coming out of stealth-mode in November of that year. The start-up was founded by industry veterans Gerard Williams III, John Bruno and Manu Gulati, having extensive industry experience at Google, Apple, Arm, Broadcom and AMD.
Gerard Williams III in particular was the chief architect for over a decade at Apple, having been the lead architect on all of Apple's CPU designs up to the Lightning core in the A13 – with the newer Apple A14 and Apple M1 Firestorm cores possibly also having been in the pipeline under his direction.
NUVIA had been able to recruit a lot of top industry talent from various CPU design teams across the industry, and had planned to enter the high-performance computing and enterprise market with a new server SoC with a new CPU core dubbed "Phoenix".
Also at Phoronix.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @01:13AM (5 children)
Can't say more consolidation is a good thing
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday January 15 2021, @01:15AM (1 child)
If the goal is to challenge Intel in servers, consolidation on the ARM side might be a good thing.
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(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @01:26AM
Yeah, I would just rather see them sign a partnership. This is just tossing bucketfuls of excess money around like they're trying to empty a flooded basement.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 15 2021, @04:14AM (2 children)
Here it actually is. When you're developing CPUs, you want just a few very large players. Scale drives down costs. Making a CPU and bringing it to market requires huge amounts of cash, so a bunch of tiny companies doing their own thing means all will fail, investors lose money and interest in the industry, and companies that bought into a new design early on will get burned and never try that again.
Let me give a space example: if you have 50 little startups with 10mil each, none will succeed in making a good rocket. if you have 5 with 100mil each, you just might get 5 good rockets, increased competition, and lower launch cost.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday January 15 2021, @01:13PM (1 child)
I tend to disagree. What you say is true if you talk about vertical integration (architecture + design + fab). If you go fab-less and create a mod of another architecture (say ARM) a bunch of people working from a garage can play the game (if they are good). Going fab-less is what saved AMD. IMO we need a few top-notch, independent fabs (you are right, that does cost money) which serve the designers. Unfortunately, we do not have that kind of competition at the moment (Samsung, Intel are somewhat behind TSMC, GlobalFoundries seems to have given up).
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 15 2021, @04:16PM
a bunch of people in a garage can draw up a cpu in altera. in fact a bunch of people without a garage did that in college, myself included.
to get support for your garage cpu from major operating systems and hardware and software vendors, requires a lot more, which a garage does not have, and a large company does. vertical integration has zero to do with any of this.
you may disagree, but your example of when your way worked is AMD. a huge company.