Chip manufacturer Qualcomm just bought a startup company that was founded by three former Apple engineers, for around $1.4 billion. The company in question, Nuvia, was founded by three engineers who had previously worked on the A-series chipsets that power iPhones and iPads, reports The Verge. The deal is centered around the evolution of 5G and will reportedly benefit the 5G-capable Snapdragon line chipsets. Qualcomm will now bring Nuvia’s engineers expertise on high performance and low-power chipset design and will integrate the Nuvia CPUs with Snapdragon, to deliver a new level of computing performance. The demands of 5G computing are higher now and with this acquisition, Qualcomm will work on maintaining Snapdragon’s leadership and improving Qualcomm CPUs’ performance.
Nuvia’s CEO, Gerard Williams, who used to be Chief CPU architect at Apple, stated that improving CPU performance is a very important aspect for future computing innovations.
Nuvia has been developing a flexible custom chip core, that can result in a lot of different chips in the future. Nuvia CEO said last year the chip core the company was working on was very much like a mobile core, in terms of size and power, but with higher performance.
In a press statement, Qualcomm said that Nuvia CPUs are most likely going to be integrated across Qualcomm’s broad portfolio of products that power flagship smartphones and next-gen laptops, among other things.
Nuvia founders and their employees will be joining Qualcomm. Microsoft, Samsung, Google, and other leading tech companies have all shared their support for the acquisition in the aforementioned press statement.
