Qualcomm just snapped up Apple’s chief architect and his CPU startup
- Qualcomm has announced a $ 1.4 billion deal to acquire chip design company Nuvia.
- The young company was founded by Apple manager Gerard Williams III.
- He is the longtime chief architect behind a variety of Apple CPUs and chipsets.
Qualcomm is currently the front runner in the Android space, but thanks to players like Apple, it faces stiff competition in the general smartphone and computer space. Now the US chip maker has announced a $ 1.4 billion deal to take over the young silicon design company Nuvia.
Nuvia was founded in 2019 by the former Apple silicon manager Gerard Williams III together with Manu Gulati and John Bruno. Williams was the main architect behind several large Apple CPUs and chipsets from 2010 to 2019.
Williams’ LinkedIn profile states in particular that he is behind the CPUs Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane, Monsoon, Vortex, Lightning and Firestorm. These CPUs were introduced in the Apple A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12, A13 and A14 series. The Nuvia founder’s profile also shows that he was the chief architect for Apple’s Mac hardware.
Going back even further, the Nuvia co-founder worked at Arm from 1998 to 2010 on CPU technologies such as the Arm Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A15 CPU cores.
Recognition: LinkedIn / Gerard Williams III
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In announcing the contract, Qualcomm said that Nuvia has industry-leading expertise in “high-performance processors, systems on a chip and power management for compute-intensive devices and applications.” How will Qualcomm leverage the new company’s expertise?
“Nuvia CPUs are expected to be integrated into Qualcomm Technologies’ broad product portfolio and support flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops and digital cockpits as well as advanced driver assistance systems, advanced reality and infrastructure network solutions,” the company said San Diego explains.
In other words, it seems we might expect future Qualcomm smartphone processors to swap Arm’s Cortex CPUs for (new) in-house solutions. This marked the first time since the Snapdragon 820 in 2016 that custom CPU designs had been used. But the big difference between now and then is, of course, that at Qualcomm it wasn’t Apple’s chief silicon designer who worked for it.
It’s also worth noting that Qualcomm says Nuvia CPUs can be found in next-generation laptops, suggesting that future Windows on Arm laptops will see a significant performance boost. And it’s just in time for Apple to make waves with its M1 Mac computers.
We have contacted Qualcomm to learn more of their intentions with Nuvia and will update the article as soon as they get back to us. Do you think this deal will help Qualcomm beat Apple? Give us your thoughts in the comments!
