Qualcomm To Acquire High Performance ARM SoC Startup NUVIA

[Space Heater]

While Qualcomm hasn't had the guts to finish their own design to conquer the ARM server market, they now want to re-enter that market with such an acquisition?!

It may be important to note that in this press release, Qualcomm do not specifically mention what they are planning to do with the Nuvia IP. They seem to be careful in not claiming that they are going after the server market , so I wonder if this is Nuvia already giving up on their original goal of an arm SoC for the datacenter in favor of a big pay day.

This may be due to Qualcomm being nervous about Nvidia acquiring arm, and not wanting to be dependent on Nvidia-owned cores for their products.

[Jumbotron]

I had mentioned before in one of the hot ARM threads on Phoronix that after Apple has destroyed the ARM makers with their performance gains over them in short order that Qualcomm had better shit or get off the pot.

I just heard a huge flushing sound. Qualcomm just found ARM Jesus and the game will now be truly joined with Nvidia and Apple.

[ms178]

It may be important to note that in this press release, Qualcomm do not specifically mention what they are planning to do with the Nuvia IP. They seem to be careful in not claiming that they are going after the server market , so I wonder if this is Nuvia already giving up on their original goal of an arm SoC for the datacenter in favor of a big pay day.

This may be due to Qualcomm being nervous about Nvidia acquiring arm, and not wanting to be dependent on Nvidia-owned cores for their products.

Thanks, I wasn't careful enough with reading the press statement, but I assumed Nuvia was working on a server chip offering first and thought Qualcomm would bring that to market under their own brand. But the press statement is more vague on this, just as you said: "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."

It would make the deal even stranger if Qualcomm wouldn't even want to use Nuvia's IP in servers, but only for laptops and IoT. After all they still had their own mobile design team capable of scaling-up and down their own designs?

[Jumbotron]

You guys have to understand that Qualcomm had to do this because they are in real trouble. They have been iced out of several ARM markets. Apple obviously but they were never going to let their ARM roadmap be dictated by anyone but themselves any way. However, Qualcomm has been iced out by Microsoft also as they are working with ARM directly for their custom ARM SoCs to compete with Apple. So too has Qualcomm been iced out of Facebook, Amazon and Google servers and cloud infrastructure.

And for the first time rival Mediatek has the #1 Market Share of ARM SoCs in smart phones on a global basis. So Qualcomm is getting iced out of the budget to mid range phones as well.

It was probably cheaper by half or more to simply buy Nuvia outright than spend twice as much to develop what Nuvia already has and STILL take 5 years to roll it out. Plus, Nuvia was probably going to have funding issues going forward as they really didn't have contacts yet for working models, at least not at the scale the venture (vulture) capitalists wanted to see for their expected payback.

Qualcomm badly needs an Apple M1 like SoC. Nuvia really needed a big payout. Marriage made in Silicon Valley heaven.

[curfew]

It was probably cheaper by half or more to simply buy Nuvia outright than spend twice as much to develop what Nuvia already has and STILL take 5 years to roll it out. Plus, Nuvia was probably going to have funding issues going forward as they really didn't have contacts yet for working models, at least not at the scale the venture (vulture) capitalists wanted to see for their expected payback.

Qualcomm badly needs an Apple M1 like SoC. Nuvia really needed a big payout. Marriage made in Silicon Valley heaven.

It's pointless to bash the "vulture capitalists" when companies like Nuvia are baked for a quick cash-out for their greedy founders. Lots of huge promises, no actual working product, only simulations and blueprints.

If they actually have something on their hands, it's barely gonna challenge Apple's contemporary offerings. The worst-case scenario is Qualcomm bought itself a bag of problems with which it will stubbornly waste that five years sorting out before giving up.

[Jumbotron]

It's pointless to bash the "vulture capitalists" when companies like Nuvia are baked for a quick cash-out for their greedy founders. Lots of huge promises, no actual working product, only simulations and blueprints.

If they actually have something on their hands, it's barely gonna challenge Apple's contemporary offerings. The worst-case scenario is Qualcomm bought itself a bag of problems with which it will stubbornly waste that five years sorting out before giving up.

I can't even begin to tell you how wrong you are....but what the hell....let me try.

You don't spend 1.4 billion if you are not going to see that turn around and become "accretive" to corporate profits in 2 years or less.

Second....this is achieved by strategically watching potential competitors or partners do your very expensive and time consuming R&D for you. If they fail...ok...you spent nothing. If they succeed, look to buy them out at a premium for their work, but at a discount to the amount you would have had to have put in yourself.

Third...buy talent. None of you guys know what Qualcomm just bought. They didn't buy Nuvia. They bought this guy.



" 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. "

Read that again....

" 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. "



Is it clicking now ??

Qualcomm saw what Apple did with the M1, shattering the entire ARM ecosystem in one fell swoop and officially kicking off the Age of ARM on the desktop.

I mentioned several times on various threads here that Qualcomm, if they were smart, should spend what they had to to poach an Apple engineer or two. They took my advice ( not really...but great minds do think alike )

As I said above, Qualcomm is in trouble, deep trouble. They have been iced out of having their ARM based SoCs by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Fujitsu, etc, etc. And Mediatek has taken over the low to midrange in the Android phone and tablet market to such a degree that Mediatek, not Qualcomm ships more ARM SoCs that anyone in the world.

Nuvia...and Gerard Williams III, the lead architect of the world class and leading Apple SoCs including the M1, was a brilliant stroke of strategic engineering gamesmanship. Now Qualcomm can compete with the likes of Nvidia and Apple and even have a shot at Ampere.


From the press release:


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."



https://www.anandtech.com/show/16416...agnitude-shift

[Jumbotron]

This guy who posted on Anandtech concerning the Qualcomm purchase of Nuvia is completely spot on.



lemurbutton - Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Not surprising. I previously wrote that Qualcomm is expected to become a serious player in laptops. It seems like they're setting their sights on laptops, desktops, and the cloud with the purchase of Nuvia.

It's quite clear that the future of computing is ARM. PC makers like Dell/HP/Lenovo need an answer to Apple Silicon or Macs are going to start eating up market share. No, AMD/Intel isn't going to be able to match the efficiency of Apple Silicon. It will have to be another ARM competitor to challenge Apple Silicon. Qualcomm is trying to position itself as that competitor like they have been in the mobile.

I personally thought that Intel was going to buy Nuvia. I guess Qualcomm makes a lot of sense too.

I think Qualcomm's stock is a better buy than AMD's now that they bought Nuvia. Qualcomm is already generating massive revenue and profit compared to AMD and now they're on the right side of the x86/ARM battle. Qualcomm makes AMD's stock look very overpriced.

I like this deal even more than Nvidia buying ARM. This deal is very likely to go through regulatory review while it's hard to imagine the UK/China approving the Nvidia/ARM deal.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16416/qualcomm-to-acquire-nuvia-a-cpu-magnitude-shift

[Jumbotron]

Here is a more complete profile of the engineers at Nuvia that are now working hand in glove with Qualcomm to produce a Qualcomm equivalent to Apple's M1.



Clearly the co-founders of Nuvia see an opportunity, and they are seeing it from inside the hyperscalers. Gerard Williams, who is the company’s president and chief executive officer, had a brief stint after college at Intel, designed the TMS470 microcontroller at Texas Instruments back in the mid-1990s, and was the CPU architect lead for the Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A15 designs that breathed new life into the Arm processor business and landed it inside smartphones and tablets. Williams went on to be a Fellow at Arm, and in in 2010, when Apple no longer wanted to buy chips from Samsung, it tapped Williams to be the CPU chief architect for a slew of Arm-based processors used in its iPhone and iPad devices – namely, the “Cyclone” A7, the “Typhoon” A8, the “Twister” A9, the “Hurricane” and “Zephyr” A10 variants, the “Monsoon” and “Mistral” A11 variants, and the “Vortex” and Tempest” A12 variants. And Williams was also the SoC chief architect for unreleased products – and that can have a bunch of interesting meanings.

The two other co-founders, Manu Gulati, vice president of SoC engineering at Nuvia, and John Bruno, vice president of system engineering, both most recently hail from hyperscaler and cloud builder Google. Gulati cut his CPU teeth back in the mid-1990s at AMD, doing CPU verification and designing the floating point unit for the K7 chip and the HyperTransport and northbridge chipset for the K8 chip. Gulati then jumped to SiByte, a designer of MIPS cores, in 2000 and before the year was out Broadcom acquired the company and he spent the next nine years working on dual-core and quad-core SoC. Gulati then moved to Apple and was the lead SoC architect for the company’s A5X, A7, A9, A9X, A11, and A12 SoCs. (Not just the CPU cores that Williams focused on, but all the stuff that wraps around them.) Between 2017 and 2019, Gulati was chief SoC architect for the processors used in Google’s various consumer products.

Bruno has a similar but slightly different resume, landing as an ASIC designer at GPU maker ATI Technologies after college and significantly as the lead on the design of several of ATI’s mobile GPUs prior to its acquisition by AMD in 2006 and for the Trinity Fusion APUs from AMD, which combine CPU and GPU compute in the same die. Bruno then did nearly six years at Apple as the system architect on the iPhone generations 5s through X, and like Gulati, moved to Google in 2017, in this case to be a system architect.

Both Gulati and Bruno left Google in March last year to join Williams as co-founders of Nuvia, which is not a skin product or a medicine, but a server CPU upstart. Carvill joined Nuvia last November soon after it uncloaked, and so did Jon Masters, formerly chief Arm software architect for Linux distributor Red Hat.


1.4 billion dollars for just what is in each of these guys' heads is chump change for Qualcomm. The AGE of ARM is truly here. x86 is dead for anything other than heavy iron servers, very high intensity HPC and Supercomputers. And even so, ARM is rapidly encroaching in each of those markets.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/02...pu-incumbents/

[Space Heater]

Isn't it funny how Jumbotron pretends to be a "great mind" yet his spam posts consist primarily of copy-pasting articles and ego-stroking posturing? He's the ultimate Dunning-Kruger poster who has convinced himself he is a "great mind" of computer architecture.

[curfew]

I can't even begin to tell you how wrong you are....but what the hell....let me try.

You don't spend 1.4 billion if you are not going to see that turn around and become "accretive" to corporate profits in 2 years or less.

I have a story for you about a company that spent 16 billion on a buy-out and failed to do shit with it... (Nokia acquiring Alcatel-Lucent.)

Your blind trust in companies doing expensive purchases is laughable. Besides 1.2 billion isn't all that much for Qualcomm. It actually fits quite neatly into the picture considering how desperate they must be right now.

There is a huge demand for a product that does not exist yet, but one that Qualcomm should already have but decided to ignore due to shortsightedness. Now they heard that there is a company promising to deliver the golden cow with udders spewing out liquid platinum, and decided to grab it for a measly $1.2 billion.