Founded less than a year ago and already valued at a ten-digit figure: Mobile processor manufacturer Qualcomm wants to take over the start-up Nuvia. Both companies have agreed on a purchase price of 1.4 billion US dollars – now only the authorities have to approve the takeover.

Reason for the high price, Nuvias are engineers, as the company employs many people who previously worked for AMD, ARM, Apple, Broadcom, Google and Intel, often in high-level technical positions. Founder and CEO Gerard Williams III was at Apple for almost 10 years until the beginning 2020 as CPU chief architecture, previously 12 years at ARM. So he is very familiar with the development of high-performance ARM computing cores.

So far, Nuvia has only talked about its own CPU core with the code name Phoenix, which is actually in ARM server processors should land. Performance per watt and the absolute power should be above the offer from AMD (Zen 2), Intel (Sunny Cove) and Apple (A 13 Lightning), however So far there was no finished silicon, let alone independent tests.

Better Snapdragon processors Will the Nuvia takeover come about , all employees switch to Qualcomm. The expertise gained is to be used in all of its own processors – from smartphone systems-on-chip (SoCs) to notebook models and automotive chips. A re-entry into the server market would be conceivable, but does not address Qualcomm in the announcement.

Since the switch to 64 – Bit processors Qualcomm only uses slightly adapted standard ARM computing cores in its own Snapdragons. The chip manufacturer was previously successful with the self-designed 32 bit cryo-cores. With Nuvia, Qualcomm could build on old times and compete with Apple in high-performance ARM processors. Apple is currently converting its Macs to its own ARM SoCs, against which Qualcomm has not yet had an adequate answer. The Snapdragon 8cx for notebooks is significantly slower than the competition.

(mma)