Qualcomm Approached Intel About a Takeover in Recent Days

[russellbeattie]

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.

[synergy20]

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.

[DeepYogurt]

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...

[Dalewyn]

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.

[high_na_euv]

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

76k+26k=102k

[tazu]

Letting 80% go seems to have worked for X.

[yieldcrv]

Acquisitions often involve trimming the fat

[Animats]

That's Qualcomm proposing to take over Intel!

[bee_rider]

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

[Onavo]

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

[mark336]

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

[ksec]

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

[ywvcbk]

> 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.

[bornfreddy]

https://archive.ph/WrZrH

[osnium123]

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

[Wytwwww]

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.

[hollerith]

How would China block a deal between 2 US companies?

[Dalewyn]

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

[FDAiscooked]

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.

[NAHWheatCracker]

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.

[papercrane]

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.

[wslh]

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.

[fidotron]

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.

[dgacmu]

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.

[viral007]

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.

[h2odragon]

Intel peaked with the PPro

[meragrin_]

What about the dividend payouts?