Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has boasted that his company can beat Apple devices and emerge as the dominant leader in the laptop market. Amon is banking his hopes on acquiring three core chip engineers who formerly worked at Apple and developed Apple’s M1 chipset. The former Apple architects left the company in 2019 and set up a chip company, Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired for $1.4 billion.
After the three top Apple chip engineers, led by Gerard Williams, left the company to set up Nuvia, Apple filed a lawsuit against Williams and accused him of poaching the two other engineers to set up a rival company using Apple technology. Although the lawsuit is still pending, Apple contended that the aim of Williams was to have Apple acquire Nuvia – supposedly its own technology.
While Williams and the two former Apple engineers had disclosed that their intention was to position Nuvia as a competitor with Intel and AMD, the fledgling company was eventually sold to Qualcomm with all its technology placed at Qualcomm’s disposal. Amon recently said with the acquisition of Nuvia and the former brains behind Apple’s chips, Qualcomm is better positioned to release the best chip in the market and dominate smartphone and laptop markets.
He also said his company will hit it big in China despite the trade restrictions imposed against China tech companies by the United States government. He said Qualcomm will witness massive revenue growth from China for its core smartphone chip business. He boasted that his company is not only going to produce the best modem chips for smartphone wireless connectivity but has acquired the brains to transform smartphones into computers as can be proven with top premium Android devices.
Qualcomm supplies chips to Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices, but noted that were producing the best processors in the market does not pan out, his company can license technology from Arm. According to Amon, “we needed to have the leading performance for a battery-powered device. If Arm, which we’ve had a relationship with for years, eventually develops a CPU that’s better than what we can build ourselves, then we always have the option to license from Arm.”
Well, that sounds like Plan B if Plan A with Nuvia fails.
Currently, Nvidia Corp is in talks to acquire Arm for $40 billion, a development that Qualcomm and industry regulators have opposed. While Amon disclosed that Qualcomm will not compete for CPUs needed for data centers used by cloud computing organizations such as Arm does, he said his company will be glad to license Nuvia’s designs for cloud computing to organizations that want to manufacture their own processors, a move that could set up Qualcomm for direct competition with Arm.
Source: 9to5mac.com
