Qualcomm has completed its acquisition of NUVIA, in a bid to challenge Apple’s custom silicon.
Arm-based processors power the majority of smartphones and tablets, with Apple and Qualcomm both making their own line of chips. Unfortunately for Qualcomm, Apple’s custom silicon continues to be the fastest in the industry — often by a wide margin.
Qualcomm is looking to close that gap with its acquisition of NUVIA, a CPU and technology design firm. One of its founders, Gerard Williams III, was lead architect at Apple for over a decade, working on all of Apple’s in-house chips up to the A13.
“The world-class NUVIA team enhances our CPU roadmap, extending Qualcomm’s leading technology position with the Windows, Android and Chrome ecosystems,” said Cristiano Amon, President and CEO-Elect, Qualcomm Incorporated. “The broad support of this acquisition from across industries validates the opportunity we have to provide differentiated products with leading CPU performance and power efficiency, as on-demand computing increases in the 5G era.”
The addition of NUVIA should provide a major boost to Qualcomm’s efforts at a time when mobile computing and 5G technologies are more important than ever.
