Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

> That's far fetched and hard to believe. IIRC there were talks about Qualcomm maybe buying some secondary subsidiaries/departments form Intel and somehow it got extrapolated to Qualcomm acquiring Intel (unless there is any credible information to back that up?)

Also reported in WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/qualcomm-approached-intel...

That is Reuters and WSJ reporting it, not an X post by a anonymous rando. It mentions at least two sources.

This is not a rumour, it was at least somewhat real. Doesn't mean it will happen, it seems to be very preliminary and exploratory.

View on HN

It won't happen because neither the US nor the EU antitrust regulators will allow it. It isn't just up to Qualcomm and Intel.

Some other deal, where Qualcomm buys some pieces of Intel, might be possible.

> This is not a rumour, it was at least somewhat real

How can you tell? I'm not denying that and obviously can't claim to know but I just don't see any public information that would allow us to make this conclusion.

WSJ, Reuters and everyone else regularly report rumours that sound credible.

Although if we're only talking about "exploring" rather than anything more that's probably true, there is no reason for Qualcomm to at least try and do the math of at what price point it might start making sense and they should be obviously be doing that.

I just don't really see how is that particularly newsworthy since it's just extremely improbably (due to factors both Intel and Qualcomm can't directly control).

> WSJ, Reuters and everyone else regularly report rumours that sound credible.

Huh? You live in a different reality than I do. These are reputable sources and I need to move onto something more productive.

> These are reputable sources

Yes? And? Did I imply that there is something wrong with that or that they shouldn't be reporting it? I assume our definitions of what is a "credible rumour" differ...

> You live in a different reality than I do.

If you can seriously believe that Qualcomm could actually acquire Intel (unless Intel's management is engaging in some extreme amount of fraud to hide the fact that the company is on the brink of imminent bankruptcy) then yes, that must be the case...

Market cap of Qualcomm is 2x of Intel market cap(~200B vs ~100B). Current Intel stock price is the same as 1997. In 1 year intel stock price lost more than 50%.

I'm not sure money would be the real issue.

Nvidia wasn't even allowed to buy ARM even though they weren't competitors and had almost no real overlap. This would be considerably harder to pull off.

Also you have that whole AMD64/x86 patent thing. Not sure about the details (and maybe the original agreement has expired and that part wasn't renewed) but according the original deal the cross licensing agreement would automatically expire if either party was acquired.

I think the first reason is more than enough but if it's not and they still have something similar about newer x86 related features developed after 2009 Qualcomm would only be buying Intel for the fabs and other assets or would have to pay off AMD if they want x86.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com