This is Nuvia, the company with just two years of life for which Qualcomm has paid 1,400 million dollars

One of the youngest companies in the semiconductor industry it has just been acquired by the gigantic Qualcomm. For $ 1.4 billion Qualcomm has acquired Nuvia, its employees and the technologies they are developing. The idea is to integrate all of this into your future products. However, what is surprising here is the large sum they have paid for a company that was barely founded in 2019.

Qualcomm has announced the official acquisition of Nuvia for a total of $ 1.4 billion. Their engineers, patents and technologies that they are developing now become the property of Qualcomm and will join the company’s roadmap and teams. Specializing in chip design, Nuvia has an interesting origin and history behind it.

Founded by three former Apple engineers in 2019

In November 2019 Nuvia began her wanderings with a series of investments. The company has three major managers behind it: Gerard Williams, Manu Gulati and John Bruno. The three previously worked at Apple. If there is an important merit that can be attributed to them, it is of course the creation of the A series of Apple chips. These are the chips used in the iPhone and iPad.

Manu Gulati and John Bruno have subsequently also worked at Google and prior to the creation of Nuvia. At Google they have also been an important part of the design and development of the company’s chips and hardware. Now both the three of them and the rest of the engineering team integrate with Qualcomm’s leadership, research and development teams.

Nuvia hasn’t given much detail about the products they are developing. However, yes that they have declared on some occasion that its objective is to design its own nucleus and from scratch. Reason? Create processors that are more energy efficient and substantially more powerful.

To get those improvements in energy consumption they focus on the design and microarchitecture of the chip, making it similar in size and volume to current mobile chips but with more power. In other words, they promise something like a mobile chip in resource consumption and with the power of a computer chip.

Your integration into Qualcomm

During all this time Nuvia has emphasized that they are focusing on data servers and it is for them who they design the chips. According indicate on its official website, its mission is to “reimagine silicon in a new way and create computing platforms that redefine performance for the modern data center.”

However, Qualcomm’s business is more focused on mobiles, some computers and just big servers. So how does Nuvia fit in here? There is no reason not apply these technologies also to processors for consumer electronics devices.

Qualcomm comments that one of the reasons for this acquisition is 5G. Processors with 5G currently have a very high power consumption compared to previous generations. Nuvia can offer “improvements in CPU performance and energy efficiency to meet the demands of next-generation 5G computing.”

Here there is one more point to keep in mind: ARM. Currently Qualcomm chips are heavily based on ARM, so you have to pay ARM licenses for this. ARM is currently owned by NVIDIA, one of Qualcomm’s main competitors. Nuvia has been developing their kernel with a bit more independence from ARM, they are still based on this architecture but not as much as other processors. With the integration of Nuvia, future Qualcomm products will depend a little less on ARM.

More information | Qualcomm