Qualcomm’s NXP Deal Is a $47B Wager on Computers You Drive | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm’s NXP Deal Is a $47B Wager on Computers You Drive

bloomberg.com

31 pointswalterbell10 comments

"Qualcomm stated that it will not provide support for Android Nougat on any device using the Snapdragon 801 or 800 chipsets. The Adreno 330 GPU does not support the Vulkan or OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics APIs, which must be present in order to meet Google certification requirements for 7.0"

I would have hoped that someone bought Qualcomm and burn the brand for good. I hate them ever since they don't release updates for the two year old Snapdragon 801.

To be fair, the BS is on the Google part too. Nougat runs on old binaries on a 2011 Galaxy Nexus just fine.

Vulkan or OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics ? Yeah, I really need those for checking my email and browsing the web on the phone.

Imagine MS blocking Windows $version because your GPU doesn't support newest DirectX to render some obscure animation. How about just not rendering it on older hardware and doing it on new ones ?

It's more to do with the Google daydream support.

Which is non existing on devices without high enough resolution anyway. My device isn't usable without Google Daydream?

There's a little uprising going on in the Netherlands about the price and rewards to the CEO. He stands to gain about $.5B through this deal. This, while the KKR deal in 06 was made possible partly through government subsidies in the years that followed. (Not really my type of politics btw). If the government wanted equity they should have asked.

But it's impressive that the turnaround of NXP took 10 years and built $30B in value.

They keep saying NXP fabs cannot be used for manufacturing Qualcomm chips. All the RF and analog front end components could probably be moved over to NXP fabs. And the digital products of NXP could be manufactured by 3rd party fabs, giving Qualcomm better pricing per unit.

However, I fail to see a marriage made in heaven between sensors (from NXP) and processing(from Qualcomm) pricing complete solutions for automotives.

Sure, there is going to be a lot of new silicon content in a car(but less, or much less cars ), but most of that silicon content would be in new areas - AI and machine learning, LIDAR, Radar ? , Vision - areas where nxp doesn't have any advantage, on the opposite - where startups and other companies like Google and Nvidia beat it.

To get those capabilities, wouldn't it be better for Quallcom to invest in R&D or buy startups ?

Another skill NXP has(via Freescale), is knowing how to build failure proof chips(via redundancy, etc). But my guess is that isn't that terribly hard skill to ackuire, and if not ackuire , there are already probably 3 companies with that skill(TI, NXP/Freescle, Renesas), and at least on startup - so enough people to partner or hire. And in any case , that knowledge is just the start , applying it to the complexities of AI is the real challenge.

And the third skill is of course - access to the automotive sales channel, possibilities of cross selling , etc. But will that be a big issue for the new tech ?

> failure proof chips(via redundancy, etc). But my guess is that isn't that terribly hard skill to ackuire

I would not assume that. Fault tolerance is non-trivial. Furthermore don't underestimate the value of IP in this space.

I would be careful of trivializing the last point that you made. Things like extremely long design cycles, environmental requirements, expectations of value-add engineering services, product lifetimes etc. make the auto market different in significant ways from consumer electronics. If you're a company like NXP, these are core competencies. If you are oriented towards consumer market, these are annoyances as best and serious cultural challenges at worst.

Please... the automotive market is a joke.

They have the experience and the product lines vetted for military and aerospace. That's a different league entirely.

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