Interview with Qualcomm's new CEO Cristiano Amon, who says it plans to license Nuvia's designs to cloud computing companies that want to build their own chips
(Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc's new chief thinks that by next year his company will have just the chip for laptop makers wondering …
ReutersStephen Nellis
Context & Ripple Effects
Qualcomm bought Nuvia with plans to apply its technology across smartphones, laptops and automotive processors; the proposed cloud licensing extends that earlier cross-device Nuvia strategy to customers designing their own silicon. Qualcomm had also publicly ruled out building its own fabs, making design IP a more natural expansion route than manufacturing.
Later coverage placed Nuvia's team at the center of Qualcomm's PC-processor roadmap, underscoring that the company was treating the acquisition as a reusable design capability rather than a single-product asset.
First-order effects
Cloud computing companies seeking proprietary chips gain a potential route to Nuvia designs without Qualcomm becoming their chip manufacturer.
Qualcomm adds prospective licensing revenue to the uses of Nuvia technology alongside its own processor products.
Second-order effects
Qualcomm must manage the boundary between selling its own chips and licensing designs to cloud customers whose requirements may differ from its established device markets.
The broader deployment of Nuvia designs raises the commercial value of the same engineering team Qualcomm later assigned to its next-generation PC CPU effort.
Third-order effects
If major chip designers increasingly monetize architectures through customer-specific licenses, competitive advantage shifts toward reusable IP and system-design expertise rather than ownership of fabs.
Cloud buyers' pursuit of proprietary silicon would make compute design a more direct source of strategic leverage, while concentrating more influence with firms able to supply proven architectures.
The trend: Chip designers are broadening from selling finished processors to licensing adaptable architectures to customers that want greater control of their compute roadmaps.
.@qualcomm's @cristianoamon hyping up Nuvia chips coming next year. Certainly worth keeping an eye on this; for now, supply/demand/app limitations mean Intel's 11th gen is fine, but next year PC OEMs are going to need an answer to @Apple's Mx chips. https://www.reuters.com/...
@reckless Or “what year will you deliver a chip as fast as the one in the $400 iPhone SE from last year?” A13: https://browser.geekbench.com/ ... 888+: https://browser.geekbench.com/ ...
“Qualcom will start selling Nuvia-based laptop chips next year.” Qualcomm's Nubian based chips will never be as good as Apple's Mx chips. What makes the Mx sing is the HW and SW tight integration. https://www.reuters.com/...
@dfabu What vexes me is that for all the AMD/Intel coverage, nobody seems interested at all in highlighting what a bad deal Qualcomm CPUs are. I know they aren't sold as discrete parts, but crikey. These are in everyone's pockets...where is the “news you can use” angle?
I keep wondering where @IanCutress, @LinusTech and the rest of the CPU commentariat is on the serial disaster of Android-ecosystem CPUs. It's serially newsy! Qualcomm gets away with murder *every year*. Why? https://twitter.com/...
@yesiwebto Qualcomm, meanwhile, wants to sell you a modem...so they make a bad tradeoff: cram modem IP onto the die, using space Apple puts towards core perf. Won't market well, so take *even more* space from existing cores and add more of them to buff core count numbers. It's a …
@reckless Heh. It's just bad to take Qualcomm at face value on performance claims. There's no history to justify it. Their chips have sucked (for the price) for many years, and y'all keep falling for it. It's bad for buyers and the market. Challenge them on the (massive) perf gap…
Let me get this straight: - guy who ran CPU group that serially under-performed Apple for a decade, often due to cache-penny-pinching on in-house designs... - ...has given a press Q&A about how they're going to beat Apple's laptop parts... - and focuses on modems?
In the absence of competitive chips from Intel or AMD, Qualcomm hopes to power laptops as performant and efficient as those from Apple/ARM. (Good luck with that.) https://in.finance.yahoo.com/ ...
1/ @Qualcomm is known as the 5G company or the smartphone company, but new CEO @cristianoamon has his sights set on performance leadership in the laptop market as it converges with phones and tablets, he says in an interview: https://www.reuters.com/...