Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

[GeekyBear]

After a decade of being assured that the short support window for Android devices had a root cause in the lack of support device makers received from Qualcomm, they are the last company that I want to see buy Intel.

[bfrog]

Meanwhile x86 has maintained backwards compat for (checks calendar) yeah decades. Literally decades. With standards up the wazoo to avoid the disaster that is the Arm ecosystem without UEFI or something like it.

Every Arm SoC being a snowflake needing special attention by the OS is a huge hassle. There's a reason there's no simplified Arm installer for operating systems.

[ASalazarMX]

Intel squandered its dominance on the CPU market for decades. Qalcomm sucking the remaining life of it would be a fitting end for a player that lost its way.

Wonder if the increasing backwards compatibility became too much to bear, but IMO it never really tried to tread new grounds for risk of losing a comfortable position.

[geerlingguy]

Qualcomm still hasn't shipped any of the Snapdragon X dev kits, two months and counting. If they can't deliver on their promises (that and CoPilot PCs having very disappointing sales), how could they do anything besides further drag down Intel?

Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1])

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/24/apple-has-reporte...

[kev009]

Qualcomm's RF design is best in class. This is their bread and butter and they have been consistently good at it forever.

Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not because Qualcomm is bad.

It bears in mind that just because you are good at one thing does not imply you will be good at another. For instance, Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product or various entities trying to produce MIPS and ARM products failing time and time again.

[wmf]

Companies should do what they say they're going to do, but these dev kits are an example of something that's relevant to HN but not to Qualcomm's business.

[cowmix]

When this platform was heralded as the “AI” desktop, I pre-ordered both the dev kit and a laptop. Like many of you, I’ve experienced a months-long delay in the delivery of the dev kits. Although I STILL don't have my devkit, I received my laptop pretty much on time. -- and I quickly discovered that despite Windows on ARM (WOA) being over a decade old, the support for open-source tooling is as complete as Swiss cheese. Key Python modules are missing, and even the Git command-line (git bash) client isn’t functional yet!

I mean, forget about basic open-source development, let alone performing AI inference work on your new Snapdragon laptop.

After some digging, I’ve learned that just four overworked developers in Prague make up the core team unclogging this tooling dependency log-jam. Gah!

For what it’s worth, WSL2 (Linux on Windows) actually runs quite impressively on the Snapdragon X.

[pas]

... Intel wasn't able to ship on EUV, so they would be in great company.

[kev009]

The headline seems intentionally bombastic and false. The text specifies that they are interested in lines of business, for example consumer computing, not the entire entity.

[MattGrommes]

Qualcomm consists of at least 4 lawyers for every engineer. If this happens expect a lot more lawsuits making anything involving hardware much more expensive for everybody.

[jjtheblunt]

Not plausible. I worked at Qualcomm for several years in engineering and office of the chief scientist, and that would be insane inversion of division headcounts.

[Narhem]

Qualcomm makes lots of their money by holding a monopoly on wireless chip patents. They use lawyers to bully other companies out of the space.

You can compare this with the patent wars of the companies in Silicon Valley which came to halt when the orgs realized they were effectively giving money to lawyers instead of innovating.

Qualcomm doesn’t really have real competition in Southern California. It’s cheaper for them to bully smaller companies with lawyers than employ more engineers (not sure if it’s possible to employ more engineers in the wireless space regardless).

You could also argue Qualcomms success is related to the other companies which reside around them. They have effectively built an “office moat” with their wireless patents.

[refulgentis]

No way, 4x?!

[015a]

Wasn't there some clause in the Intel/AMD x86-64 cross-licensing deal which voids it if either company changes ownership? I have some recollection of that being a thing.

But to be fair, Qualcomm might not care.

[electronbeam]

Deals can be amended for $$

The idea is to keep the number of x86 suppliers low, but enough patents are expired already you could probably make an x86_64 avx2 era cpu without asking

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Strange timing - Qualcomm just announced hundreds of layoffs literally yesterday:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/chipmaker-qualcomm-lays-of...

[nativeit]

This doesn’t mean they’re broke, it just means they don’t value institutional memory and experience as much as they do cash and dividends.

[ChrisArchitect]

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41604817

[dzonga]

selling intel to Qualcomm, would the equivalent of selling yourself to a vampire instead of selling blood.

the reason Apple ended up making their own wireless chips is due to Qualcomm

[Woodi]

How are MS and Qualcomm finances related ? They look like good budies with no visible reason. And if they are close then MS can have their own cpus. Win4ever !!!11 :)

But it's possible plain silicon is outdated and Intel stuff was splitted for a reason, eg. "photonics" part goes to "datacenter" division, fabs can be spun off and re-named any second.

But it's USoA ! - if you win military contract you live OK for few years and do not sell out suddenly like Sun - they did it just instantly after loosing military contract. Or maybe they (Sun managers) was preparing it 2 years ahead when dey bought Mysql :) Just theoretising :)

[fidotron]

I wonder if Intel still have a suitable Arm architecture license that would be transferable? It seems unlikely without Arm approval, but a bundle could offset some of the cost Qualcomm might be thinking about, as that lawsuit might be getting too expensive, even for them.

For context: https://www.reuters.com/technology/arm-qualcomm-legal-battle...

[onepointsixC]

A sale isn’t going to happen. Intel has had a rough quarter but their lunar lake launch looks promising, beating Qualcomm’s offerings on battery life and performance.

[snitty]

The issue long term is that Lunar Lake is built on TSMC, so Intel is netting a fraction per chip of what they'd make if they made it themselves.

Intel is currently investing $7B a quarter into getting their foundries competitive again, and it's not clear yet that they'll be able to really do so at scale. And even if they do, it's not clear whether those foundries can effectively serve customers that aren't Intel.

The reason people trust TSMC to make their chips is because TSMC isn't making a competing chip. If I come to an Intel Foundry with my design and work with them to spin up some new capability to get the features to work right, there isn't much of anything that stops Intel Chips from using that new capability to compete with me in a year.

[gunalx]

I really don't see it. Maybe a merger of some sort but still. Has Qualcomm anything to gain from taking intel, and likewise intel from being merged in?

[lagadu]

They might just split and sell off the cpu and gpu divisions and keep the rest of Intel's (very wide) portfolio. Of particular interest might be the Intel foundries.

[ginko]

Qualcomm should be broken up.

[LarsDu88]

This would not be good for either party. And Qualcomm would only do this to kill x86 prematurely which I'm sure AMD will pick up on.

[jovial_cavalier]

>Is this how arm vs x86 ends?

No... Intel isn't the only one that makes x86 processors and Qualcomm isn't the only one that makes arm.

Separately, Intel should sell them the flagging chips business and keep the fledgling foundries business separate.

[qwytw]

> flagging chips business

Is it "flagging", though? Intel still seems to be pretty good at designing chips and their next gen laptop chips (made at TSMC) are allegedly more power efficient than the Snapdragon Elite (of course remains to be seen). It's the foundry that's dragging down.

[zeusk]

If you look at the financial statements, it's quite the opposite however?

Their chips made on TSMC process are doing quite well and IFS has failed to secure worthwhile external customers and is losing money in their expansion hand over first.

[knowitnone]

I want Apple to buy Intel so they can own their fabs. Instead of a billion going to TSMC, spend the billion to fix the fabs and the next several billion is profit.

[incognition]

US gov already put 20Bn into Intels fabs.

[tippytippytango]

Apple, c’mon. Get in there and just buy intel. Get the foundry working, spin out x86 into its own legacy, fabless business unit. Make your own chips, it’s only 100B!!

[monocasa]

They already made the investment playing king maker for TSMC; I doubt they want to start that over for no real reason.

[osnium123]

It’s very hard to get semiconductor factories to work. In almost all cases, it’s better to let the professionals at TSMC to do the fab than to rely on newbies to the foundry industry.

[rldjbpin]

as outlandish as it sounds, there might be a better chance of this happening than the arm deal. the only reason being that both companies are registered in the same country, where the other parties would have a harder time blocking things.

[icar]

This is potentially bad news for open source kernels. They do lots of work there.

[WheelsAtLarge]

Intel has focused on manufacturing efficiency for years now. Their innovation abilities have been lacking. A combination of Qualcomm and Intel will be a powerhouse. Intel as an entity will disappear but Qualcomm will be the stronger for it. I doubt Intel will go for it but I hope it happens.

[qwytw]

> Their innovation abilities have been lacking

And Qualcomm's haven't? What did they really design besides the Snapdragon X Elite in the last 10+ years?

> but I hope it happens

So more industry concentration and even less competition would somehow be a good thing?

[osnium123]

China will block this deal from ever happening.

[ectospheno]

How exactly would a foreign power block two US companies from merging when it has no significant stock holding in either?

[electronbeam]

What would motivate this

[xmly]

good joke

[melling]

Yeah, Intel is really cheap. It would be a steal.

[Narhem]

Is there a patent or something Qualcomm is trying to get from Intel? Seems like an odd acquisition otherwise.

As far as chip manufacturing they target different markets, I’d bet most IP isn’t transferable between the orgs anyway, especially since Apple bought Intels modem patents already.

[klyrs]

A... single patent? No, there are licensing agreements for that.