Qualcomm has just made a sudden change in the chip market and the semiconductor industry. The company Qualcomm has decided to purchase Nuvia, formed in 2019 by three former engineers and chip specialists who worked at Apple on the A-series chip line that powers the iPhone and iPad.
Qualcomm is now paying $1.4 billion for the firm and focused to build next-generation CPUs in data centers, mobile and other devices. The Company is specifically calling out the growth of 5G that is further accelerating the convergence of mobility and computing. Nuvia has built on Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon technology leadership that delivers step-function improvements in CPU performance and power efficiency.
Gerard Williams, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno are all three company’s co-founders who will be joining Qualcomm and expected to integrate the company’s chips that make their way into data centers, vehicles, smartphones, laptops and other devices.
Nuvia CEO Gerard Williams, formerly chief CPU architect at Apple stated that “CPU performance leadership will be critical in defining and delivering on the next era of computing innovation.” It is a fact that the combination of Nuvia and Qualcomm will bring the industry’s best engineering talent and resources to create a new class of high-performance computing platforms.
In the chip market, Qualcomm is collecting tech and talent and relying on third-party companies to better integrate its hardware and software. Apple and Qualcomm are engaged in a legal battle but the message was clear: Apple was tired of paying other companies to license their tech and leads and to drop Intel in the CPU field for Apple’s own custom-designed line of M1 processors.
The company, Nuvia, is reportedly building a more flexible custom chip core called Phoenix. According to the source, the speed and efficiency of its chip core was “very much like a mobile core in terms of size and power.”