The Nuvia acquisition that happened in 2021 allowed Qualcomm to go ‘toe to toe’ with Apple in making a chipset that featured completely in-house CPU designs that exude incredible performance and efficiency. Powering a multitude of Windows 11 notebook models, the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus are above and beyond anything that the San Diego firm has ever produced. However, apart from competing with its rivals better, a report reveals that acquiring Nuvia served another goal; saving as much as $1.4 billion in annual payments to ARM, with Qualcomm CEO testifying this little detail during an ongoing trial.
The technology provided by ARM to Qualcomm was causing the latter to fall behind Apple, with the Chief Executive admitting that the Nuvia acquisition was justified
Admitting to the jury in a Delware federal court, Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon testified that the encouragement to acquire Nuvia was that the chipset maker could save millions in licensing fees that it pays to ARM annually. In 2021, Nuvia was purchased for $1.4 billion, allowing Qualcomm to develop its custom Oryon cores. Gerard Williams, who co-founded Nuvia in 2019, said these use less than one percent of ARM’s technology.
Another reason was that the use of ARM technology meant that Qualcomm was falling behind the likes of Apple in terms of performance, which made the Nuvia acquisition even more necessary. This would explain why the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which also uses custom Oryon cores, has bridged the single-core and multi-core performance gap with the A18 and A18 Pro this year, though there is still room for improvement.
We are expected to see an even bigger performance leap next year with the unveiling of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 because the latter is said to support ARM’s SME (Scalable Matrix Extension) like Apple’s M4. When acquiring Nuvia, Qualcomm faced a challenge convincing the board that the firm would spend millions in taking over a company whose only experience was developing a custom solution for the server market and had no expertise in the laptop or smartphone category.
Qualcomm’s CEO eventually gained the board’s trust when he stated that the Nuvia acquisition could save the company $1.4 billion in annual payments to ARM. As for how the firm came to this $1.4 billion figure, it was based on the expectation that Qualcomm would enter the PC market with a brand new silicon that is only occupied by Apple and its M-series of chipsets. It is estimated that Qualcomm has only shipped around 720,000 units since the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus, occupying a paltry 0.8 percent of the global market.
However, Qualcomm intends to make life difficult for Apple by introducing notebooks powered by the company’s chipsets for as low as $700 next year. At the time of writing, ASUS’ Vivobook S 15 with an OLED screen, 16GB RAM and a 512GB is currently going for just $699 on Amazon, so in terms of pricing, some laptop models have already started fulfilling Qualcomm’s goal. It remains to be seen how long this trial will go on, and if anything noteworthy pops up, we will update our readers accordingly.
News Source: Reuters
