Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
theverge.com
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Every Arm SoC being a snowflake needing special attention by the OS is a huge hassle. There's a reason there's no simplified Arm installer for operating systems.
However… ACPI is apparently a pretty awful thing to implement. When it doesn’t work, or mistakes are made (looking at my own 13th gen HP laptop right now - borked ACPI tables means unpatchable broken sleep on Linux), then it’s pure frustration.
Device trees on the other hand are much more binary. Either everything generally works or it doesn’t at all. It’s a valid approach.
https://github.com/j0hnwang/OMEN-Transcend-16-ACPI-fix
But yes, device trees are far nicer to work with.
short-term support helps qualcomm sell more because their customers want to sell more phones to the same users. on the other hand, for the industrial partners there is an "LTS" model of support given (side effect being fairphone 5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320800).
long-term support through backwards compatibility helps intel because they can sell new chips with the assurance that the ancient, unmaintained industrial software continues to run in a shinier box.
Wonder if the increasing backwards compatibility became too much to bear, but IMO it never really tried to tread new grounds for risk of losing a comfortable position.
Majority of it's revenue goes to Taiwan for TSMC as margins.
Having Intel fab, will cut the middle man, and revenue will skyrocket, all while no money leaves the USA.
A monolith will drag both down
Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1])
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/24/apple-has-reporte...
I mean, forget about basic open-source development, let alone performing AI inference work on your new Snapdragon laptop.
After some digging, I’ve learned that just four overworked developers in Prague make up the core team unclogging this tooling dependency log-jam. Gah!
For what it’s worth, WSL2 (Linux on Windows) actually runs quite impressively on the Snapdragon X.
My thinking is this, if Windows ARM is a success -- there will be more units out there that can ALSO run Linux too. If Windows ARM is a failure, then Linux will suffer too.
What an embarrassment. So basically, it’s not a serious product.
For individual devs laptops are fine, usually, but there's also no solid "reference" platform, since all the laptops are targeting different consumer lines.
That's a bit beside the point though, the Dev kits should've come out months before the consumer products were launched... and failing that at the same time.
Qualcomm and Arrow said the units would ship "tomorrow" in July... and it took over a month (after accepting many orders) before they even updated the stock to a more realistic timeframe, late September.
Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.
Internally, nearly 20 years. It was kept alive for a long time by a single individual as a side project. When I first got out of college I actually helped update tests that were being used for it (I maintained the ARM compiler test harness, and it was being used for some Windows on ARM stuff as well).
Microsoft has never went fully in on arm, whereas Apple was willing to burn bridges and start brand new.
Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not because Qualcomm is bad.
It bears in mind that just because you are good at one thing does not imply you will be good at another. For instance, Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product or various entities trying to produce MIPS and ARM products failing time and time again.
I keep hoping Apple will release a MacBook with a 5G chipset. The rumors are saying their in house one will ready in 2026 at the earliest. It sure seems like a long road given they bought the intel RF division in 2019.
That's an interesting statement, as their Wi-Fi cards are some of the best on the market and common laptop-purchasing wisdom says to buy anything with an Intel Wi-Fi adapter and avoid everything else.
On the 802.11 wireless front, intel maintains a marked advantage in having inbox drivers in Linux by the time you need them. I would take an ath11k/ath12k over equivalent Intel parts but Qualcomm's driver upstreaming process takes way too long while Intel tends to integrate before the products are generally available.
So, I wouldn't say intel's modems were awful, maybe not as good as the QC's of the time, but it could just have been immature, and underfunded. Apple OTOH, is famous for taking somewhat failed teams and having a long enough vision to create great products. They seem to understand that 9 women can't create a baby in 1 month and are willing to keep iterating until its right if it solves a problem for them.
You can compare this with the patent wars of the companies in Silicon Valley which came to halt when the orgs realized they were effectively giving money to lawyers instead of innovating.
Qualcomm doesn’t really have real competition in Southern California. It’s cheaper for them to bully smaller companies with lawyers than employ more engineers (not sure if it’s possible to employ more engineers in the wireless space regardless).
You could also argue Qualcomms success is related to the other companies which reside around them. They have effectively built an “office moat” with their wireless patents.
In San Diego most of the land zoned for office space is owned by the Jacob brothers (although not directly connected to Qualcomm anymore). Imagine if Google and Apple had to rent their campuses from Oracle.
But to be fair, Qualcomm might not care.
The idea is to keep the number of x86 suppliers low, but enough patents are expired already you could probably make an x86_64 avx2 era cpu without asking
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/chipmaker-qualcomm-lays-of...
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41604817
the reason Apple ended up making their own wireless chips is due to Qualcomm
But it's possible plain silicon is outdated and Intel stuff was splitted for a reason, eg. "photonics" part goes to "datacenter" division, fabs can be spun off and re-named any second.
But it's USoA ! - if you win military contract you live OK for few years and do not sell out suddenly like Sun - they did it just instantly after loosing military contract. Or maybe they (Sun managers) was preparing it 2 years ahead when dey bought Mysql :) Just theoretising :)
For context: https://www.reuters.com/technology/arm-qualcomm-legal-battle...
Intel is currently investing $7B a quarter into getting their foundries competitive again, and it's not clear yet that they'll be able to really do so at scale. And even if they do, it's not clear whether those foundries can effectively serve customers that aren't Intel.
The reason people trust TSMC to make their chips is because TSMC isn't making a competing chip. If I come to an Intel Foundry with my design and work with them to spin up some new capability to get the features to work right, there isn't much of anything that stops Intel Chips from using that new capability to compete with me in a year.
No... Intel isn't the only one that makes x86 processors and Qualcomm isn't the only one that makes arm.
Separately, Intel should sell them the flagging chips business and keep the fledgling foundries business separate.
Is it "flagging", though? Intel still seems to be pretty good at designing chips and their next gen laptop chips (made at TSMC) are allegedly more power efficient than the Snapdragon Elite (of course remains to be seen). It's the foundry that's dragging down.
Their chips made on TSMC process are doing quite well and IFS has failed to secure worthwhile external customers and is losing money in their expansion hand over first.
That the chips currently produce more return than foundries is expected - it’s an established business. The foundries require much more up front investment. However the chips side of business has recently begun to show some cracks.
The foundries side of the business is in a different phase of life. It currently needs some TLC but has the potential to be totally ascendant at some point in the future. Assuming snapdragon is more interested in a chips business than a foundries business… it would just make sense to split them. There is tension with both under one roof as it is.
And Qualcomm's haven't? What did they really design besides the Snapdragon X Elite in the last 10+ years?
> but I hope it happens
So more industry concentration and even less competition would somehow be a good thing?
The Snapdragon 8 series have been the flagship SoCs for non-Apple phones for years, that's why people had high hopes for the Snapdragon X on PCs
They "just" are just using standard ARM cores which is hardly comparable to what Intel and Apple are doing (and they have been lagging behind Apple by a few years since forever; arguably Intel is closer to the M series than Qualcomm is to A series).
> Snapdragon X
I thought it's because they finally designed their own core, since ARM has been completely ignoring the laptop market and couldn't really offer anything?
Lots of 5G modems
Intel would be doing much better as well if they didn't have to share x86 with AMD and could sue ARM into oblivion...
Is it though? Qualcomm is more likely to just strip Intel for parts than to turn it around and we'll just end up with more market concentration and less competition.
https://www.rcrwireless.com/20230911/uncategorized/kagan-how...
It would be tricky, though, because my sense is that China still needs Intel/Qualcomm more than they need China. At the same time, it would be pretty deadly to be denied access to that market and your products subject to excess tariffs if imported by others.
In practice, yes, as you point out: US firms must have assets in Europe to compete effectively.
But even if they didn't, Europe could deny access to the European market. So there is no reason to try and minimize surface in Europe. e.g. Apple has to comply with European antitrust rulings about app store access, even if Apple were to just sell their product to third party distributors in Europe and not have any presence in Europe.
Not really, Apple would just get customers the same way they’re sold in any other part of the world that doesn’t officially have iPhones (i.e. Russia), the EU doesn’t have the authority to seize shipments purely based on a violation of the DMA.
I think it goes like this: The major market regulator could say directly/indirectly: Hey you can merge in the US ... but good luck operating in our geography in a frictionless manner if we are against your merger. As a regulator we can make life hell for you if you don't obey our anticompetitive laws. Since you derive a high percentage of your revenue/profits you must listen to us !
It all depends on the percentage of sales in the foreign geography. With EU/China it can be quite high -- especially for tech companies.
So yes, foreign powers can and often do block companies from merging.
CEO to board: We want to acquire $LESSER_COMPANY, but China opposes. We can go through, but we'll lose easy access to that market, and in net terms our valuation will drop.
Board: Forget it.
As far as chip manufacturing they target different markets, I’d bet most IP isn’t transferable between the orgs anyway, especially since Apple bought Intels modem patents already.