Qualcomm Approached Intel About a Takeover in Recent Days | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm Approached Intel About a Takeover in Recent Days

wsj.com

83 pointsbgc78 comments

This is like Oracle buying Sun. Qualcomm is a famously litigious company. They'd decimate the workforce and rely on Intel's patent portfolio to make the takeover worth it

No idea who might be infringing on what, but I'm quite sure Qualcomm's lawyers would quickly figure out which companies they'll put the squeeze on. Or just throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. AMD, Apple (think Rosetta), TSMC, cloud providers, etc.

Intel is 1/3 of AMD by market cap but 6x the employee, that's 18x difference. If QCOM takes over INTC, they might need let a LOT go to revamp it, like 80% of them.

Letting 80% go seems to have worked for X.

If by worked you mean "the site isn't dead", yes. If you mean more "profitable", I don't think that's true, is it?

Setting aside the political reasons for less advertising revenue, it's still running and there are 200M DAU. Many ex-employees swore the servers would catch fire by now.

> Many ex-employees swore the servers would catch fire by now.

They've 'caught on fire' many times, such as the time login/2fa broke, or the weeks/months where you were rate-limited to only a few hundred interactions per day.

Judging by how unreliable it has been ever since, there's likely constant firefighting going on.

Can't confirm. It works for me just as well as it did in 2022.

Not my experience at all. It is faster and has slightly more feature since.

It really doesn’t work well. But it has the advantage in that, if some messages just don’t appear… well, you don’t really notice.

That has nothing to do with letting go staff and everything to do with the owner.

Letting go staff has everything with the owner though.

Wrong. A substantial number of advertisers dropped X.com because it isn't brand safe (for example their ads are located next to racist or Nazi or pornographic content). A substantial number of the staff let go were involved in keeping the site brand safe.

Google also should not show x.com on search engine as its another social media platform, it has nothing to do for ranking

Let go of 80% of workers and 84% of revenue. Brilliant.

Aren't the two disconnected? The revenue lost is a result of advertisers not wanting to be connected to Musk's politics. Downsizing isn't what caused that.

You can't tell easily without informations from inside.

I think it is fairly easy to tell when advertisers publicly pulled out and gave a very explicit explanation.

Musk got rid of the people who owned the relationships with the brands and agencies that drove the ad revenue. Burning those relationships plus getting rid of content moderators made sure advertisers were very skeptical of being on the platform. Then there's the GARM lawsuit causing that tiny org to shut down, suing another non-profit for point out brand safety issues, etc.

It was Musk's actions.

I thought the advertisers pulling out was more a direct result of the tweets he posted or liked. Perhaps those relationships were strained already due to what you've pointed out, but I don't know that those employees could have made a difference in relation to those posts.

Congrats. You completely fabricated a history to fit your world view.

Firing the teams that manage moderation and letting Coca-Cola and Nike paid for ads show along side Nazi and porn content, basically allowing the ad side of the platform to go to shit, is actually much of the reason for the advertiser exodus.

I'm starting to see ads during Great Replacement and Kill The Brown People threads on Twitter. It's not pushing me towards buying a product or clicking an ad.

My stance on this rather is: the advertiser should like it if viewers consider the product advertised to be better than the tweets around it. :-D

(I hope I didn't give Elon Musk a bad idea concerning how to pitch his agenda to advertisers ;-) ).

Letting go of 80%of intel’s employees and the company is dead in weeks other than a skeleton crew of lawyers, bean counters, and top level execs stuffing their golden parachutes with maximum parachute.

Twitter is just a relatively simple website, though. They aren’t doing anything particularly complex or innovative and aren’t releasing any new products.

It could survive for years in maintenance mode as long as people continue using it.

It's not happening though, an acquisition of Intel means the end of x86 due to cross-licensing terms between Intel and AMD which stipulate they all terminate upon either party being acquired.

Granted, Qualcomm has interests in ARM so this might actually be what they want: Embrace, No Extending, Extinguish.

AMD developed the 64-bit instruction set, so perhaps they could keep it.

I'm sure there would be plenty of lawfare, though.

Intel and AMD literally cannot manufacture x86 CPUs without the other, their cross-licensing and dependencies go both ways beyond amd64.

If Qualcomm somehow actually convinces Intel to sell, that means Intel is immediately out of business because all they (could) make are x86 CPUs. AMD would likewise become a zombie overnight with only their Radeon GPUs remaining on their catalog.

It's far more likely for AMD to come and bail Intel out if things really came to that.

What's embarassing about this is that Qualcomm could actually go and ask Intel if they're selling without it sounding like a complete joke. That signifies how far Intel has fallen, Qualcomm trolled Intel and actually got away with it.

Highly likely that anti-trust regulators would make licensing of x86 a requirement for letting the deal go through.

You know agreements can be amended, right? Nothing is set in stone when big money is involved.

Whoever wants to buy out Intel needs to convince both Intel and AMD that the subsequent arrangement will be better than the monopoly-but-not-a-monopoly they enjoy today.

I'm willing to bet AMD would sooner spend money bailing Intel out to keep that going first before entertaining thoughts about sharing their cake.

Intel isn’t in bad enough shape to need a bail out from their main competitor.

Patents on x86-64 are long expired....did Intel really use much else from AMD?

> an acquisition of Intel means the end of x86 due to cross-licensing terms between Intel and AMD which stipulate they all terminate upon either party being acquired

I believe Intel's licenses to AMD's IP would terminate, but not the other way around.

Intel has this many ppl because they are like AMD+TSMC

76k+26k=102k

AMD+TSMC revenue was almost $100 billion in 2023. Intel was $54 billion.

They shouldn't have 20k more people with half the revenue.

It was $79 Billion in 2021...

AMD is arguably understaffed though. They're executing well with design, but system integration, software, and support are all still lacking.

ex. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amd-laptop-oems-decry-poor-16...

Acquisitions often involve trimming the fat

That's Qualcomm proposing to take over Intel!

Huh, I guess Intel probably has a lot of patents.

That would be very bad. Qualcomm are very nasty about patents.

Pray that doesn't happen, Qualcomm's software and driver story is generally known as "go fuck yourself" and "my way or the highway".

Maybe they want to improve? They seem to be willing to upstream Linux drivers for their laptop chips.

We'll believe it when we see first-class Linux support actually happening.

Qualcomm's recent issues include their contract with Microsoft to provide chips for the Co-Pilot+ pcs ends in November. And CoPilot PCs with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips have serious performance issues playing games. See my tech news site about this: https://asiaviewnews.com/gigabots/threads?p=20008 and https://asiaviewnews.com/gigabots/threads?p=10006

Only mentioned it abut two weeks ago [1] it would be great if Qualcomm buy it as whole and not certain parts. And two months [2] ago about Intel being attractive as an acquisition target.

Qualcomm currently has close to zero Server revenue. And they have already failed twice to enter that market. Intel on the other hand has plenty of expertise and network. Potential synergy with GPU for a top to bottom mobile to datacenter GPU design. There isn't a single GPU vendor who does that currently. Qualcomm also has the expertise in both Digital and Analog custom chip design which is extremely useful for telling the Intel Fabs what they need to work and deliver on.

Qualcomm is probably the top 5 most hated company on HN. This skewed most opinions, but they were also the number 1 spot on spending R&D to revenue ratio in the tech sector for many years.

I would have been 100% supportive of the move if Steve Mollenkopf was still the CEO or at least Chairman of Qualcomm. But I guess he will now be very busy at Boeing. Not so sure about current CEO Cristiano Amon if he could lead the new Qualcomm + Intel.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467574

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41144020

> There isn't a single GPU vendor who does that currently

Nvidia technically? Of course Switch/Tegra is extremely outdated but they are developing a replacement.

Nvidia isn't in Smartphone. Although yes arguably Tegra in Switch and their self driving unit.

https://archive.ph/WrZrH

China will block this deal if they think it’s good for the US semiconductor industry.

How would China block a deal between 2 US companies?

China has a say because both companies do business in China. It’s the reason why the Intel acquisition of Tower semiconductor fell through.

That was a much smaller deal though. A Chinese regulatory block for a $5B acquisition might rise to "not worth it" to Intel. Saying "No more x86 laptops or qualcomm radios in China" is more of a "Trade War!" kind of thing.

That's not saying the China would love it, or that they wouldn't have leverage. But regulatory power has its limits and it's not like every nation gets a veto on every merger.

It was a critical acquisition for Intel to learn how to be a foundry so it was critical.

Why would less competition and more market concentration be good for the US semiconductor industry?

It's not like Qualcomm has been the most innovative company ever, they make ARM/Cortex based chips (which is almost a commodity) and control the baseband/modem market because of their patents, so unlike Intel the have basically no competition.

The thought is that if there is an acquisition it might lead to more silicon volume running through Intel’s US based fabs. Of course, Qualcomm might decide to shut the fabs down but that is a whole other story.

Here's a non-paywall, non-captcha, non-JavaShit version of the article courtesy of Reuters and archive.is: https://archive.is/MR3PZ

Intel has been atrociously managed.

If you invested $1 in Intel in 1998, your investment would still be worth $1. Less than that if you adjust for inflation.

Intel peaked with the PPro

What about the dividend payouts?

Looks like they’ve been paying out healthy dividends for about ten years now https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/intc/dividend-...

They also had a stock split in 2000, and I’m not sure the parent comment is accounting for that.

The dividend was cancelled (stopped) recently.

I think it's not relevant to the original point

More than 10 years and that's why Intel's stock price fell so precipitously as Intel cancelled that dividend and Intel losing its dividend focused luster to dividends focused investors!

But the amount of Folks that comment on these Mergers & Acquisitions(M&A) sorts of articles and the US regulations regarding M&As and the main litmus test for rejection there being if that Acquisition will reduce the competitive landscape of Intended market players that compete in that market!

And So Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and previous Windows on ARM Laptop/PC products are more direct competition to Intel's/AMD's Windows on x86 products! Linux on ARM as well, as Tuxedo Laptops(Linux OS Based OEM) is planning on releasing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux OS based laptop!

That and Intel only controls the IP surrounding the x86 32 bit/Earlier 16/8 bit parts of the x86 ISA while AMD's the IP owner of the x86 64 bit ISA extensions! But Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement between them for their respective parts of the x86 ISA IP rights and so Intel has no legal right to transfer AMD's x86 64 bit ISA extensions License to any third party and ditto for AMD and any of the 32 bit earlier parts of the x86 ISA that are Intel's IP.

Qualcomm or any other competitor in the CPU/dGPU market will not be able to get past the regulators easily and Nvidia can not acquire Intel because of Intel's Discrete GPU market presence where Intel's ARC/Later Discrete GPUs are a welcome 3rd player attempt at the low end to mainstream dGPU market place Competition against AMD and Nvidia!

I am unpersuaded Intel could have done anything once they failed to get any sort of traction in phones or tablets.

AMD starting to execute properly only made their headaches that much worse, but they had been far too fat for too long.

> failed to get any sort of traction in phones or tablets

And had they stuck with XScale it I don't think it would be surprising if they ended up in Qualcomm's current position (default high-end ARM CPU maker). Yet they consciously decided to throw it all away..

I can attest to it, the value hasn't grown much in my inactive portfolio. This portfolio was set up as set it and forget it in 1999. I will need to run a realized gain/loss statement.

You can't just look at the stock price. INTC has split and had dividends since 1998.

If you bought $10,000 of INTC in Sept 19th, 1998 and held it to today the stock would be worth $17,000 and you would've collected almost $12,000 in dividends.

That's just over a 4% annualized return, if we back out inflation it's about 1.5%.

That's still crap. The only way you'd be in decent shape is if you took the dividends and invested those in any of INTC's competitors.

Just imagine if you'd invested that money in Domino's Pizza instead (the hungry investor strategy). You'd have like $350,000.

Is there any site that shows historical stock graphs with an option to include dividend reinvestment and adjust for inflation? Practically every online conversation about stock returns makes these mistakes.

Koyfin and yCharts do that. You're looking for "total return".

https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio

Is pretty good.

With the stock split and dividends reinvested, the $1 would now be worth $1.64, _not_ inflation adjusted. You'd still be in bad shape if you inflation adjust - the $1 with inflation would be $1.93. So you've still lost money overall, alas.

If you didn't reinvest the dividends you'd be ahead, though. Which is kind of ironic - but you'd have taken out a fair bit of money from 2016-2022 when the price was high.

You would have been paid $17.7074 in dividends, according to https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/INTC/dividends/history.

If you bought one shared near the end of 1998, you would have paid around $30. That share would be worth around $22 now. So, you would have gained around $9 not accounting for reinvestment of dividends.

Not a good return on investment, in comparison, but you picked 1998 in the middle of the dot com boom. If you picked the end of 1995, you'd have paid $7 and have around $40 today, which isn't too much worse of a return than the S&P 500.

This isn't to say Intel hasn't been poorly managed, by the way.

Yes, think if you have invested in Bitcoin when it was announced on Slashdot. The problem with cherry picking dates is that we don't have a time machine yet.

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