Qualcomm began developing PC-based mobile processors after investing US$1.4 billion to acquire chip design company Nuvia in 2021. Recently, Qualcomm finally stated that chips developed using the Nuvia architecture will be officially released in 2024.
Many technology giants are interested in Nuvia, including Microsoft , Google and Intel . Nuvia's original goal was to create the world's leading server processor. In 2019, Nuvia poached many employees from apple , which caused Apple to be extremely angry and sue Nuvia to court, which led to Nuvia's reputation. This incident attracted the attention of many investors, including Qualcomm.
Qualcomm has been researching its own chips to help the Windows platform realize the transfer of chip architecture from X86 to Arm. Due to the poor performance of the chips developed by Qualcomm, a large number of consumers refused to accept Qualcomm's products. The emergence of Nuvia gives Qualcomm hope. Nuvia was founded by retired Apple engineers. The core personnel of this company have worked in technology companies such as Apple, Arm, and Google. As a result, Qualcomm began to extend an olive branch to Nuvia, and after several rounds of negotiations, the two parties reached an acquisition agreement. As a result, Nuvia quickly joined the Qualcomm camp.
But after acquiring Nuvia, Arm took Qualcomm to court. The reason is that Nuvia uses chips developed under Arm's license and cannot transfer them to Qualcomm without Arm's permission. Because of this incident, the relationship between Qualcomm and Arm began to break down. Prior to this, because Arm's technology development speed lagged behind Apple's, the gap between Qualcomm's mobile chips and Apple's mobile chips was getting wider and wider, causing Qualcomm to be extremely dissatisfied with Arm.
Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia can reduce its dependence on ARM. Most of Qualcomm's chips require direct authorization from Arm. Although Nuvia's core also uses ARM's underlying architecture, it is a custom design. For Qualcomm, using more custom core designs in chips can reduce licensing fees to Arm.
In order to continue to consolidate its market position, Qualcomm issued a new policy in October 2022. From 2024 onwards, SOC (system-on-chip) based on Arm architecture will no longer be allowed to use external GPU, NPU (embedded neural network processor) or ISP (image signal processor). This will affect chips developed by Qualcomm and Nuvia. Also affected by this policy is Apple. Although Arm has issued relevant policies, losing big customers like Qualcomm and Apple will also cause huge losses for Arm. Both sides will continue to play games.
Recently, Qualcomm developed the Oryon processor using the Nuvia architecture. This chip uses a similar design to Apple's M1, but its performance is more powerful and will not be mass-produced for several years. In the future, Qualcomm can compete with Intel and AMD in the high-performance and low-power mobile processor market. Since Nuvia also uses the underlying Arm architecture, in order to get rid of dependence on Arm, Qualcomm and Nuvia plan to shift the chip architecture to Risc-V.
For Qualcomm, the successful acquisition of Nuvia not only gained technology, but also gained more talents. Since Qualcomm and Nuvia both rely on Arm's architecture, how to completely get rid of dependence on Arm is still a problem that Qualcomm needs to face in the short term.
