Qualcomm announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Nuvia, a company founded in 2019 by three former engineers of Apple’s silicon team. The agreement is worth $ 1.4 billion and will strengthen Qualcomm’s efforts to compete with Apple Silicon and create custom – designed CPUs.
Nuvia came out of stealth mode in 2019 with a powerful team of three former Apple engineers. Gerard Williams spent a decade at Apple, Manu Gulati worked on iPhone chips for eight years and John Bruno for five years.
Nuvia CEO Gerard Williams, who is seen in the main picture, will become Qualcomm’s senior vice president of engineering through this acquisition. Williams used to be Apple’s lead cloud architect, leading the development of the A-series processors within the iPhone and iPad.
The story gets even messier. Williams left Apple in March 2019 and was sued by Apple shortly thereafter. Apple’s lawsuit alleges that Williams used Apple technology and stripped other Apple employees of joining Nuvia.
Williams opposed Apple’s allegations, saying the alleged “breach of contract” was unenforceable and that Apple had been monitoring its text messages illegally. There was no resolution in this case.
In a press release from Qualcomm today, Williams said the Nuvia team will join Qualcomm to create a new class of high-performance computing platforms that set the standard for the industry. ‘Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, added that the team will improve the Qualcomm CPU roadmap:
“The world-class NUVIA team is improving our CPU roadmap and expanding Qualcomm’s leading technological position with the Windows, Android and Chrome ecosystems,” said Cristiano Amon, President and CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated. “The wide support of this acquisition from various industries confirms the opportunity to offer differentiated products with leading CPU performance and power efficiency as the computer on demand increases in the 5G era.”
As spotted by ArsTechnicaQualcomm’s press release also teases that the acquisition will help the company launch “new internally designed CPUs” in laptops from the second half of 2022. This is noteworthy because Qualcomm is currently mainly on ‘off-the-shelf’ ARM. SVE trusts.
Apple is switching the Mac series from Intel to Apple Silicon, which is also based on the ARM architecture. The company currently relies on Qualcomm for cellular modems, but this is expected to change in the future as Apple develops its own 5G modems.
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