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Comment by faragon | Hacker News Reader

So they're going to cut their CPU R&D and become a generic ARM IP integrator, plus their GPU and radio-frequency circuits (Adreno GPU, GSM, WiFi, GPS). Next moves could be discarding their own GPU for the ARM generic ones (Mali) and using 3rd party IP for the radio. Scary.

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Which is funny because the reason Qualcomm screwed up recently (besides all the anti-competitive/antitrust issues) is because it didn't come out with its own next-generation custom CPU core sooner, and had to use stock ARM IP which I guess it didn't have much experience in handling.

The shareholders' "solution" is what will destroy the company. Qualcomm would've been fine in the next 2 quarters, once it passed the Snapdragon 810 generation.

I don't know why they freaked out so badly after just one bad quarter (and after Qualcomm has constantly grown for the past 5 years) to the point where they want to split the company. That seems rather crazy. I wonder if there's something else besides next-quarter-profit thinking behind this motivation.

If you believe the article (I'm not sure whether or not I do), the shareholders didn't freak out because of the bad quarter - it was just an opportunity to push their pre-existing agenda of prioritizing returning capital to shareholders instead of investing in the business. If that happens to destroy the company in the long run, these shareholders might not care - nothing stops them from selling their shares well before the long run arrives.

It may not be a bad idea after all. Unlike Intel, Qualcomm hasn't been able to demonstrate a price-performance advantage with in house engineering. MediaTek's far cheaper ARMv8 processors are competitive performance-wise.

Um, what? Yes, the ARMv8 transition was a problem, but until then, Qualcomm had been consistently delivering the best combination of power and performance all the way back to the Snapdragon S4. It's not like Samsung was putting Qualcomm chips in their flagships because they wanted to - they had to in order to keep them competitive.

Not really. They had to due to patents for LTE in USA.

Yes, they had to pay Qualcomm for their LTE patents, but that didn't mean they had to use Qualcomm SoCs.

Other devices (e.g. Galaxy Nexus, Droid Bionic, HTC One X+) married Qualcomm LTE radios with non-Qualcomm SoCs. Even Samsung did this for a few devices (e.g. Galaxy Note and Note 2 LTE, a few S2 and S3 variants), but, until this year, that was a small and shrinking portion of their lineup.

Qualcomm's past engineering success was a big part of the reason why. Samsung/ARM's engineering failures (e.g. big.LITTLE and cache coherency issues with the original Exynos Octa) were the another part of the reason, but I don't think that changes the overall picture.

I call this BS sorry. I do not know the exact reason why samsung had to release the previous phones using qualcomm's cpus but it was not because snapdragon 805 was a better chip. Quite the opposite if you check the benchmarks for snapdragon vs exynos. Exynos wins not by a higher margin but still wins.

Snapdragon 800 was a better chip than the A15-based Exynos: http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/159152-qualcomm-snapdragon....

> Other devices (e.g. Galaxy Nexus, Droid Bionic, HTC One X+) married Qualcomm LTE radios with non-Qualcomm SoCs

The Verizon Galaxy Nexus and Droid Charge (both made by Samsung) actually didn't use any Qualcomm chips. Samsung baseband for LTE and VIA Telecom for 3GPP2 (1XRTT/EVDO). http://www.anandtech.com/show/4465/samsung-droid-charge-revi...

Samsung didn't have an integrated LTE solution. This caused battery life issues. Also, patents.

I really cannot see Qualcomm using 3rd party IP for cellular radio. It's their core business, and they are the leader in LTE modems.

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