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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Teeth gnashing about short termism among investors aside, there may be a practical reason for this move. Apple and Samsung are both moving to their own micro-architectures. Apple has been using an in-house design since the A6, and Samsung's 64-bit ARM core will likely drop in the next year or two (the M1).

Doing your own CPU architectures is a phenomenally capital intensive business, and Qualcomm may not feel positioned to keep up. Even ARM is getting left behind. The A57 is a power-hungry design that has faced major problems with thermal throttling in many designs. The amount of cash Apple and now Samaung can throw at their custom designs may be overwhelming.

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> The amount of cash Apple and now Samaung can throw at their custom designs may be overwhelming.

Not to mention all of the soon-to-be-ex Qualcomm engineers it just got a lot easier for them to hire.

That's nonsense. First off, ARM is able to "keep up" with only tens of millions in profit a year. Second, Qualcomm is one of the richest chip makers. Third, Samsung hasn't been using custom CPUs and GPUS - at all.

It's debatable whether ARM can keep up with custom cores. Both the A15 and A57 designs have been underwhelming from a performance per watt point of view. The A57-based Snapdragon 810 has suffered from thermal issues: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/in-depth-with-the-sna....

Samsung has not yet used their own core, but their custom 64-bit ARM core is at an advanced stage of development: http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/samsungs-...

Qualcomm is big, but Intel, Apple, and Samsung are all targeting custom cores in this space, and they may reasonably feel like doubling-down on their LTE technology and not trying to compete in that space.

Exynos isn't a custom chip?

Qualcomm's Krait and Apple's Swift/Cyclone are ARM compatible cores designed in-house from the ground-up. Exynos uses IP cores designed licensed from ARM.

Don't they all still use Qualcomm comm chips?

Not exclusively anymore - Samsung is starting to use it's own in-house chips for modems (some versions of S6 use them right now). Mediatek is doing the same I think. Intel has its own that the ZenFone 2 is using for example. Not sure about Apple.

Depends on what you mean by 'chips'— Qualcomm sells both discrete modems, which many cell manufacturers use, and systems-on-a-chip including modems, which they had recently been doing very well with, but just had a bad round of.

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