Qualcomm acquires semiconductor startup Nuvia for 1.4 billion dollars.

AlexGoesHigh · January 13, 2021

Nuvia is a semiconductor firm founded in early 2019 that consist of engineers and veterans that designed Apple custom High performance CPU cores and founded by 3 veterans that have worked for Google, Apple, Arm and AMD. The company made headlines since they are designing an ARM server SoC codenamed "Phoenix" optimized for single thread performance and their goal was to achieve the highest single thread performance across the entire semiconductor industry attempting to beat Apple, intel and AMD. Since their founding they have expanded their team to hire top CPU design engineers across the industry.

Qualcomm used to design their own ARM (the uArch) cores but stopped due to Arm (the company) making better designs and disolved their team when they shutdown their push for datacenter chips not being competitive in the general market, with this acquisition Qualcomm has once again their own design team and custom CPU core, which might validate Nuvia design as being market competitive, enough for Qualcomm to pay 1.4 billion all cash for it, since the company hasn't even announced their first actual CPU just the custom CPU design and their goals.

Qualcomm has said they are planning to deploy Nuvia design into future smartphone and laptop SoC products as well as industrial applications. This moves also signals that Qualcomm might try and move away from Arm designs.

This is Qualcomm full press release.

Quote

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 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 proven world-class CPU and technology design team, with industry-leading expertise in high performance processors, Systems on a Chip (SoC) and power management for compute-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 extend the leadership of Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms, and positions Snapdragon as the preferred platform for the future of connected computing.

...

NUVIA CPUs are expected to be integrated across Qualcomm Technologies' broad portfolio of products, powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions.

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As part of the transaction, NUVIA founders Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati and John Bruno, and their employees will be joining Qualcomm.

"CPU performance leadership will be critical in defining and delivering on the next era of computing innovation," said Gerard Williams CEO of NUVIA. "The combination of NUVIA and Qualcomm will bring the industry's best engineering talent, technology and resources together to create a new class of high-performance computing platforms that set the bar for our industry. We couldn't be more excited for the opportunities ahead."

Before this, everything that was know from Nuvia was their goals and pedigree, nothing else, so for Qualcomm (or any company for that matter) to acquire them without even a single product announced, just their goals and the name of their first CPU architecture announced to the public is kind of impressive, mind you, I believe Qualcomm must have seen a private demo of a prototype before committing to this purchase and not just drink the kool aid, regardless this legitimizes that Nuvia has something good going on and at the very least Qualcomm now has big pool of talent now.

Looking forward to what they come up to now.

Sources

Qualcomm to Acquire NUVIA: A CPU Magnitude Shift (anandtech.com)