[HN Gopher] Qualcomm to Acquire Nuvia: A CPU Magnitude Shift
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Qualcomm to Acquire Nuvia: A CPU Magnitude Shift
Author : pella
Score : 136 points
Date : 2021-01-13 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| nirv wrote:
| Quite sad news, to be honest.
|
| I hoped that Nuvia, given its great team of ex-Apple CPU
| architect engineers, would maintain its independence and become a
| full-fledged competitor in the desktop and server market.
| Instead, they sold to a company that is often described as "the
| Oracle of hardware companies" and "a law firm with a few
| engineers"[1][2][3].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18333270
|
| [2]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/qualcomm-...
|
| [3]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/71rjyx/why_exynos_...
| wyldfire wrote:
| > maintain its independence and become a full-fledged
| competitor in the desktop and server market.
|
| If I had to guess, Nuvia's expertise will be used to optimize
| Qualcomm's ARM, Adreno and Hexagons for the next generation of
| Snapdragon cx. Qualcomm and Microsoft dipped their toe into
| this market and now that Apple is all-in, they need an answer
| to the M1. They won't get there with reference designs from
| ARM.
|
| But once they're producing optimized ARMs for SoC apps
| processors, who's to say that they couldn't re-enter the server
| space?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Viterbi was a founder. He was an historically significant
| engineer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Viterbi
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_algorithm
| devwastaken wrote:
| With how similar processors are can you even have a small
| company without being threatened by patents at every corner?
| Part of the capitalism endgame isn't innovation, but to buy up
| potential competitors by having grey area ownership of the
| mechanisms they work with. Sometimes letting those companies
| then use your patents to continue work.
| blinkingled wrote:
| But on the other hand they didn't have many other viable
| options did they? Their expertise is ARM and they need a BigCo
| to back their R&D and subsequently manufacturing. So that
| leaves them with Nvidia and Samsung as options.
| wmf wrote:
| No, I think they could survive independently on VC funding.
| blinkingled wrote:
| Having read HN I got the impression that VC funding isn't
| always a good thing either. How is VC funding at this level
| better? (It might well be I just don't have any insight.)
| wmf wrote:
| I don't know which route is better (clearly the Nuvia
| team decided to accept the acquisition) but I think
| independence would have been possible.
| oblio wrote:
| > Instead, they sold to a company that is often described as
| "the Oracle of hardware companies" and "a law firm with a few
| engineers"
|
| Didn't Qualcomm beat out a ton of competitors?
| ohazi wrote:
| Yes, using patents.
|
| They got lucky and a handful of their early patents became
| required parts of early cellular standards. Since then
| they've lobbied the standards bodies to include features that
| require their newest patents. When that fails, because the
| mobile manufacturers are tired of Qualcomm's monopoly, they
| simply buy up more patents to make up the difference.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Yet, very remarkable given that they were nearly stomped out
| of the market around 2010-2012 by previously "no-name" SoC
| makers, making cookie cutter SoCs cheap, fast, and selling by
| tons.
|
| Yet, they recovered, and clawed back their way to the top,
| with only MediaTek now threatening them.
|
| I don't expect MediaTek to be as inept, and Pavlovian if
| Qualcomm will ever come to them with a deal, as they did with
| Allwinner 8 years ago (Allwinner gave up on mobile market,
| and Qualcomm gave them an obscene cut from their low-end
| Snapdragons in return.)
|
| And knowing Taiwanese, they simply don't sell companies
| owners spent their life working on. Very ego driven business
| culture.
| robert_foss wrote:
| Mediatek has 31% market share of the smartphone SOC market,
| and Qualcomm 29%.
|
| https://www.counterpointresearch.com/mediatek-biggest-
| smartp...
| [deleted]
| modeless wrote:
| I hope this means they are at least going to try to catch Apple.
| The complete lack of effort by them on the CPU side has been sad.
| Given hardware timelines, though, I'm sure any improvement is
| many years away.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| What are the chances of lawsuits in the near future?
|
| Not my area of expertise by a long shot, but Qualcomm and Apple
| are not strangers in court and acquiring a slew of ex-Apple CPU
| engineers is probably like trowing gas on that fire.
| wmf wrote:
| The lawsuit is already happening:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-14/nuvia-exe...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Yeah, I remember that one and was referring to it as well.
|
| What I mean is, what are the chances of new ones in light of
| this acquisition? Or is this old one not settled yet and it's
| still the same case?
| liminal wrote:
| Microsoft must be kicking themselves for not acquiring them
| arusahni wrote:
| I initially read this as "NVidia". I'm still recovering from the
| shock.
| jannes wrote:
| Happened to me too. I was already thinking about Qualcomm
| suddenly owning ARM (through Nvidia) and how anti-competitive
| that would be.
| shroom wrote:
| Think everyone did :D
| jabl wrote:
| That's kind of interesting considering Qualcomm spent plenty-o-
| millions not many years ago to develop the ARM64 Falcor core and
| Centriq server SoC, only to throw it all away just before it was
| supposed to hit the market.
| wyldfire wrote:
| It is a shame but I think they figured they had to go on a diet
| or risk an LBO.
| robocat wrote:
| Is this a common scenario? Bet all capital on a new product,
| and get bought out at the low point in market valuation:
| before the product has shown promise and the market price has
| still not recovered?
|
| Edit: I am wondering about older companies more than startups
| (presumably it is more common for startups that look like
| failing but are actually on brink of success).
| wyldfire wrote:
| I don't think it's common, no. In the 1980s I think it
| happened more often (because they had a lot of assets that
| weren't reflected in the valuation maybe?).
|
| But in Qualcomm's case they were arguably undervalued
| because of ongoing regulation/lawsuits regarding their
| licensing practices. IIRC they had shipped their Amberwing
| Centriq CPU but the reception was kinda lukewarm.
|
| AWS ended up introducing Graviton not long after -
| presumably AWS wouldn't have sourced Centriq if they had
| their own designs in the works.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq
| [deleted]
| klelatti wrote:
| That was in response to the Broadcom bid I think? Corporate
| vandalism.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Do I remember wrong that Nuvia higher ups have stated that they
| wanted to bring products to market rather than get acquired? P.S.
| I know such statements shouldn't be taken at face value anyway.
| Just curious.
| WatchDog wrote:
| 1.4B, not bad for 2 years of work.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Is it true that this will uniquely position them to compete with
| Apple's processors while everyone keeps having to use the bog
| standard (and apparently not _that_ amazing) Cortex cores?
|
| Are there other companies able to produce promising cores/any
| that could develop a serious M1 competitor?
|
| Was this acquisition mostly fueled by M1 hype (i.e. "Cortext
| chips are just fine")?
| ksec wrote:
| Replying to distract myself from the Intel news.
|
| Nuvia has shown [1] they have designs with Pref Per Watts that
| rivals or exceed Apple's current A14. Normally these sort of pre-
| design and slides should be taken with a big pinch of salt from
| Startup. But this is from Gerard Williams, ARM Fellow and
| Architect of all current Apple CPU design. So i think they are
| plausible.
|
| The improvement in Single Thread Performance is what Qualcomm
| desperately needs for their SnapDragon SoC. It will also reboot
| their ARM on Server work now that Apple and Amazon has the ball
| rolling.
|
| Tremendous respect for CEO Steven Mollenkopf, retiring later this
| summer.
|
| [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15967/nuvia-phoenix-
| targets-5...
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Nuvia has shown [1] they have designs with Pref Per Watts
| that rivals or exceed Apple 's current A14._
|
| Your linked article 1) doesn't mention A14, and 2) only
| contains a marketing image for something that didn't yet exist.
| It doesn't appear like they _showed_ anything. Did you mean to
| link to a different article?
| gigatexal wrote:
| Qualcomm CPUs for both mobile and non-mobile should be even more
| compelling in the near future with this acquisition. Apple has a
| legit competitor here.
| rektide wrote:
| $1.4 billion. Wow. That's a lot of dough.
|
| I feel like 202x might be another decade where no new chip making
| companies emerge. I had great hopes for Nuvia becoming one of
| them. My first most primitive reaction is that this is like
| another PA Semi[1]: great talent & new prospects, fresh air,
| vanishing into one of the super-massive existing players.
|
| Qualcomm does some open source work, but most of the support
| comes from outside engineers reverse engineering their products
| or otherwise doing the work[2]. The Freedreno graphics driver for
| example allows their gpu to be used (OpenGL, Vulkan drivers), &
| has been a huge effort. That work mostly comes from Google
| engineers like Rob Clark (who started Freedreno iirc), Eric
| Anholt, Igalia engineers like Danil, & countless others[3].
|
| In the wifi-router world, where Qualcomm also has a huge
| presence, we rely on hunting around for open-source code drops of
| what usually seems like pretty old but better than we've got
| code, such as this recent find[4], which is hopefully going to
| help us catch a couple years up in support level to what Qualcomm
| is doing today.
|
| Nuvia explicitly stated they wanted to chase hyperscaler market.
| And I think a lot of this was positioning. That hyper-scalers
| wanted good tech, would use good tech. Where-as a lot of the
| world, they want what they have but better, a lot of legacy
| concerns, hand holding. Nuvia wanted to build a new platform, a
| good, well supported platform, with next-gen technologies. We
| were all expecting open-source perhaps Rust-based firmwares &
| management systems, pursuant to latest OpenCompute Project specs
| &c. They were clear about targetting hyper-scalers, & big chips,
| but somehow the hope always was that they'd help reform & reshape
| computing & what was available to everyone. They certainly talked
| the good game, sounded real good on Twitter. Ah well.
|
| [1] https://venturebeat.com/2012/09/18/more-details-shake-
| loose-...
|
| [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Qualcomm
|
| [3] https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/commits/master/src/freedreno
|
| [4] https://forum.openwrt.org/t/adding-openwrt-support-for-
| xiaom...
| avrionov wrote:
| > NUVIA was originally founded in February 2019
|
| Do they hold the record for the fastest and most profitable exit?
| zyang wrote:
| This is deja vu of the Uber - Otto aquisition.
| wmf wrote:
| Netscape did a $2.9B IPO after 17 months.
| avrionov wrote:
| Adjusted for inflation Netscape price is much higher, but at
| least they had a working product and big team.
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