A start-up led by former Google and Apple employees, Nuvia, was acquired by Qualcomm last year. Qualcomm wants Nuvia’s custom Arm chip because it could use it to more effectively compete with Apple. To put things in perspective, one of Nuvia’s executives was regarded as the Apple Silicon M1 chipset’s “Chief Architect.” According to a report by The Information, Nuvia was a takeover target for a number of businesses, including Google. The Information also said that Apple had issues with the next-generation GPU it was developing for the A16 Bionic.

A “world-class CPU and design team with experience in high-performance CPUs, Systems on a Chip (SoC), and power management for compute-intensive devices and applications” is touted to be the foundation of NUVIA. The combination with Qualcomm will strengthen Qualcomm’s position as a market leader. Qualcomm is already well-known for its mobile GPUs, DSP, and dedicated multimedia accelerators. The results of Nuvia’s work are already evident in Qualcomm Oryon, a product that is based on work done at Nuvia.

This is especially a very good idea because it’s extremely possible that Google was pursuing Nuvia for its own Tensor chips. Google’s Tensor effort for Pixel smartphones offers it some control over the SoCs that go into its handsets, but having its own chipset designers ready to go with bespoke Arm cores would mean that it would no longer have to rely on Samsung and its Exynos chips for reference designs in the future. 

Qualcomm confirmed that NUVIA CPUs will be integrated with its current portfolio of products, which includes mobile processors for flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, digital cockpits, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality, and infrastructure networking solutions when it acquired the Nuvia. According to a press release issued by Qualcomm, the agreement was signed to acquire NUVIA for about $1.4 billion.

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