Qualcomm Acquires NUVIA For $1.4 Billion To Take Apple, Intel And AMD Head-On

Mobile silicon heavyweight and 5G innovator Qualcomm announced a blockbuster deal this morning, that it intends to acquire NUVIA for $1.4 billion. As a custom Arm-based CPU start-up, NUVIA’s design engineering and executive team brings with it a pedigree of proven execution, having formerly contributed to custom Arm CPU development at Apple for its Mac and iPhone products. It’s a bold move by Qualcomm that makes a lot of sense, and likely accelerates its efforts to expand into new markets and product categories.

Qualcomm already has excellent in-house custom design resources and IP for the various engines on-board current Snapdragon mobile processor offerings, from the GPU, to Image Signal Processors to silicon engines that accelerate AI. However, as an Arm licensee, Qualcomm has more recently been integrating mostly off-the-shelf Arm CPU cores into its designs. As such, it’s clear that NUVIA will bring true custom Arm core development to Qualcomm. Looking out into the future, should NVIDIA’s acquisition of Arm be approved by regulators, this move could effectively make the company less reliant on NVIDIA/Arm, only requiring Qualcomm to license the Arm instruction set itself. In addition, if what we’re seeing of Apple’s M1 silicon currently is any indication, the NUVIA design team brings the ability to scale performance further up the curve, for higher-end, power-optimized solutions. However, this acquisition isn’t just about CPU cores, but also leading-edge SoC (System On Chip) integration and design.

Qualcomm To Enable The Best Core For The Job

Modern day SoC architectures are highly tuned, many-engine designs. CPU, GPU, DSP and other types of specialized engines, are all part of the optimized heterogenous computing solutions required for anything from laptops, to smartphones, autonomous vehicles, 5G infrastructure and much more. SoC integration is what it’s all about now, and the best-tuned core for the job is what gets the workload. Qualcomm obviously felt NUVIA’s expertise in complex silicon integration would be a valuable asset in this current trend of specialized processing engines working in tandem with traditional CPU architectures. This excerpt from Qualcomm’s press release on the acquisition is what caught my eye…

“Creating high performance, low-power processors and highly integrated, complex SoCs are part of our DNA,” noted Jim Thompson, Chief Technology Officer of Qualcomm. “Adding NUVIA’s deep understanding of high-performance design and integrating NUVIA CPUs with Snapdragon – together with our industry-leading graphics and AI – will take computing performance to a new level and drive new capabilities for products that serve multiple industries.” 

Qualcomm also had a long list of supporting statements from ecosystem partners to go with its release, with execs from Microsoft, Google, Samsung, HP, General Motors, Bosch and many others chiming in. It’s clear to me that acquiring NUVIA will help Qualcomm compete more directly with the likes of Apple, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and others, as Arm-based designs continue to expand into new markets and operating systems, like Windows on Arm. Conversely, that’s not to say that NUVIA doesn’t also give Qualcomm the ability to pivot to other instruction sets as well in the future, if need be. In fact, I expect the acquisition of NUVIA is likely a brilliant move providing Qualcomm a solid insurance policy that will enable it to be more flexible in its silicon design approach moving forward, as well more quickly expand beyond handsets and 5G infrastructure to take on the big guns in core computing. 

For clarity, however, in an analyst briefing this morning, Qualcomm’s Senior VP of Product Management, Keith Kressin, told me that the company’s primary interest in NUVIA is not spurred by efforts in the data center market, but rather an expansion of its efforts in power-efficient, connected computing solutions. To me that says, heads-up Apple, Intel and AMD. Qualcomm and NUVIA are coming after your core client and embedded computing businesses, and they’re staffing up some serious A-list talent to do it.