New year with new chipsets! The company Qualcomm has acquired a startup Nuvia , develops its own processors. At the moment, the startup has not released a single processor, but for $ 1.4 billion Qualcomm bought not a finished product, but the competencies, developments and ambitions of Nuvia. At the head of the startup are real "processor veterans" who are ready to challenge Apple, Intel and AMD.
Qualcomm appears to be heading for more aggressive market competition. Interestingly, all this is happening against the backdrop of a change in management of the company: the current CEO Steve Mollenkopf will leave the post on June 30, 2021. It is a little strange that he leaves without explaining the reasons, but it is clear that they exist.
However, the company behind the Snapdragon mobile processor series plans to expand its influence. Nuvia's expertise will be used to build Qualcomm's SoCs not only for smartphones, but also for laptops. They also plan to work on automotive processors.
The company does not hide that it wants to be less dependent on ARM, which was acquired by NVIDIA, a competitor to Qualcomm. Independence, however, still looks conditional: Nuvia also uses the ARM architecture in its developments (however, they have their own core design).
The takeover of the startup was supported by such companies as Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, Xiaomi and others. No wonder: they are all interested in the fact that cheaper Qualcomm processors compete with the IT mammoths of Intel and AMD. By the way, the company has been supplying Microsoft chips for several years, and smartphone manufacturers are closely monitoring the development of the Snapdragon line.
What's so special about Nuvia
Nuvia started up a little over two years ago, in February 2019. Despite the youth of the project, the startup is far from being run by freshmen. The management includes three top Apple executives with years of experience in the development of mobile iPhone chips.
John Bruno spent five years at Apple in the mobile platform development team, Manu Gulati was part of the Apple Platform Architecture division and worked for Apple for eight years. Gerard Ulyams III stayed with the company the longest: during his nine years of experience, he worked on processor cores Cortex-A8, A15 and others, led the work on mobile chips from A7 to A14. He also put his hand to the development of the Apple M1. Prior to Apple, the trio worked for ARM, ATI, AMD, TI, Broadcom. That is, these guys understand well what they are doing.
Since its inception, the startup has focused on developing a processor, code-named Phoenix, for data centers. Despite the fact that the company has not brought anything to the market, investors believe in it: in September last year, Nuvia raised $ 240 million.
Qualcomm is serious: not only the heads of the startup, but all employees will move to the company. Such specialists do not lie on the road. The main thing is that competitors do not put a spoke in the wheel.
What to expect
In December 2020, Qualcomm unveiled its new flagship mobile Snapdragon 888 chip , based on the ARM Cortex-X1 architecture.
The main feature of the chip is the built-in 5G modem X60 and the Hexagon 780 coprocessor, which processes 26 trillion operations per second. Which is ideal for smartphones looking towards artificial intelligence. The developers say that a smartphone on such a processor can even analyze the condition of the skin and give recommendations for caring for it.
Among the brands that are preparing the flagships on the new chip are ASUS, BlackShark, Lenovo, LG, Meizu, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OnePlus, Oppo, Sharp, Vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE. The first smartphone powered by Snapdragon 88 should be Xiaomi Mi 11. It is expected to appear in the first quarter of 2021.
What will change after the purchase of Nuvia - time will tell.
