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Comment by nirv | Hacker News Reader

Quite sad news, to be honest.

I hoped that Nuvia, given its great team of ex-Apple CPU architect engineers, would maintain its independence and become a full-fledged competitor in the desktop and server market. Instead, they sold to a company that is often described as "the Oracle of hardware companies" and "a law firm with a few engineers"[1][2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18333270

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/qualcomm-...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/71rjyx/why_exynos_...

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Viterbi was a founder. He is an historically significant engineer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Viterbi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_algorithm

Qualcomm once had 7 engineers and zero lawyers. They hire lawyers much faster than they hire engineers

and every lawyer in QCOM is at least treated like a Senior Director.

> maintain its independence and become a full-fledged competitor in the desktop and server market.

If I had to guess, Nuvia's expertise will be used to optimize Qualcomm's ARM, Adreno and Hexagons for the next generation of Snapdragon cx. Qualcomm and Microsoft dipped their toe into this market and now that Apple is all-in, they need an answer to the M1. They won't get there with reference designs from ARM.

But once they're producing optimized ARMs for SoC apps processors, who's to say that they couldn't re-enter the server space?

> They won't get there with reference designs from ARM.

This nails it! I blogged about how the expected Geekbench scores for Nuvia were better than M1

- https://singhkays.com/blog/arm-cpu-faster-than-apple-m1/

Nuvia was aiming for the server space but Qualcomm probably saw an opportunity to leapfrog many generations of in-house design and catch up to A and M series chips from Apple.

For reference - Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 888 flagship lacks behind 2019 Apple A13

- https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16325/116944.png

As an aside, on mobile your site has ads on top and bottom of the browser window, leaving a bit of room in the middle to read the content which is just as often ads as your own words.

Reading that article was a distinctly unpleasant experience.

Sorry about that! That does sound like a horrible experience :( Let me look into it

> Instead, they sold to a company that is often described as "the Oracle of hardware companies" and "a law firm with a few engineers"

Didn't Qualcomm beat out a ton of competitors?

Yes, using patents.

They got lucky and a handful of their early patents became required parts of early cellular standards. Since then they've lobbied the standards bodies to include features that require their newest patents. When that fails, because the mobile manufacturers are tired of Qualcomm's monopoly, they simply buy up more patents to make up the difference.

That is just so far from truth. The reality is no one manage to compete with them even when 5G had significant tech not derived from Qualcomm. And yet they still had the best Modem.

Yet, very remarkable given that they were nearly stomped out of the market around 2010-2012 by previously "no-name" SoC makers, making cookie cutter SoCs cheap, fast, and selling by tons.

Yet, they recovered, and clawed back their way to the top, with only MediaTek now threatening them.

I don't expect MediaTek to be as inept, and Pavlovian if Qualcomm will ever come to them with a deal, as they did with Allwinner 8 years ago (Allwinner gave up on mobile market, and Qualcomm gave them an obscene cut from their low-end Snapdragons in return.)

And knowing Taiwanese, they simply don't sell companies owners spent their life working on. Very ego driven business culture.

Mediatek has 31% market share of the smartphone SOC market, and Qualcomm 29%.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/mediatek-biggest-smartp...

I think that must be in units, not dollars. Qualcomm chipsets are nearly universal on the higher end.

Not having looked at it at all, I think so too. But the trajectory of them overtaking Qcom is interesting either way.

this would help explain why all winner was on a roll making pretty great chips and has shipped absolutely worthless tripe for! he past 5 years. re-spins of rhe same shit they had been making. the chip making game feels so diseased.

But on the other hand they didn't have many other viable options did they? Their expertise is ARM and they need a BigCo to back their R&D and subsequently manufacturing. So that leaves them with Nvidia and Samsung as options.

No, I think they could survive independently on VC funding.

Having read HN I got the impression that VC funding isn't always a good thing either. How is VC funding at this level better? (It might well be I just don't have any insight.)

I don't know which route is better (clearly the Nuvia team decided to accept the acquisition) but I think independence would have been possible.

I feel the same. It is always hard to make these sorts of acquisitions work because the in house team that you're augmenting/replacing always interprets this move as a criticism of their abilities. I've seen this lead to some pretty dysfunctional (and destructive) behavior.

except in this case there is no internal team as qc switched to stock arm cores, so they would actually be replacing arm which is acquired by nvidia and given that soc design's lead time qc might not want to disclose its future soc plans to arm.

With how similar processors are can you even have a small company without being threatened by patents at every corner? Part of the capitalism endgame isn't innovation, but to buy up potential competitors by having grey area ownership of the mechanisms they work with. Sometimes letting those companies then use your patents to continue work.

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