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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I would want this to happen is if Qualcomm's obviously terrible and anti-competitive leadership would get the boot. And then the whole company's abusive culture needs to be cleaned-up.

Also, I wonder how serious Broadcom is about competing with Intel, and whether or not they would consider purchasing AMD, too, to aid in them in that effort. AMD's market cap is now only 1/10 of the price they intend to pay for Qualcomm, so it's almost a matter of "throwing some extra money on the table" at this point.

Broadcom could use Qualcomm primarily for mobile and IoT, and AMD for desktop, servers, machine learning, and automotive.

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> Also, I wonder how serious Broadcom is about competing with Intel, and whether or not they would consider purchasing AMD, too, to aid in them in that effort. AMD's market cap is now only 1/10 of the price they intend to pay for Qualcomm, so it's almost a matter of "throwing some extra money on the table" at this point.

AMD effectively cannot be bought. There is a termination clause in the cross licensing of patents between AMD and Intel for x86/x86_64 in the event either company is sold. [0]

Anyone who bought AMD would immediately cause a huge issue for any company manufacturing x86 CPUs. AMD wouldn't be allowed to manufacture x86-based CPUs anymore, and Intel wouldn't be allowed to manufacture x86_64 CPUs. The only people who would conceivably benefit from such a situation would be patent lawyers who are probably already salivating at the mere thought of litigating that.

[0] https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...

Is there anything preventing a re-negotiation of that? presumably Intel wouldn't be too enthused about losing the x86_64 licence, so would be fairly motivated to sign a new deal with the acquirer.

Intel already tried to raise this concern when AMD spun-out GlobalFoundries. I assume immediately after that one of their lawyers noticed they'd lose all rights to x86-64 if they tried to invoke the termination clause because Intel never mentioned it again.

IMHO this is effectively a non-issue and has been from the moment Intel was forced to abandon Itanium in favor of x86-64.

The other aspect is anti-trust. If x86 really does become single-source (Intel) then there is no evading monopoly status. The current US administration won't do anything about it but the rest of the world probably will. Intel would be forced to openly license x86 anyway.

I worked at Qualcomm in 2000-2001. What the heck happened since then? Seemed like a nice place at the time.

What always happens: $$$

Lots of growth occurred at Qualcomm since then. I'm assuming most of the leadership changed as the company became more and more profitable.

My thousand mile view is simply that they entered some really cutthroat markets, e.g. the low end mobile chip market, and adapted.

Is Broadcom significantly better?

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