Qualcomm will use NUVIA’s technology to develop its own CPU architecture

by ·

At the beginning of this year, Qualcomm announced that it would acquire the start-up NUVIA for $1.4 billion to enhance its own CPU performance. NUVIA was founded in 2019 by Gerard Williams III, John Bruno, and Manu Gulati. They have worked in AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, and Google and have decades of industry experience.

NUVIA’s original goal was to build a processor based on the ARM architecture for the server. According to NUVIA’s simulation, in Geekbench 5, its Phoenix core can provide at least 50% higher peak performance than AMD Zen 2 architecture and Intel Sunny Cove core, while power consumption is only 1/3, which looks very competitive. The performance of the Phoenix core may also be better than the high-performance core of Apple A13, which means that it is better than the general Cortex A-series cores widely used in smartphones, tablets, and individual PCs.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 895

Recently, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon accepted an interview with Reuters, outlining Qualcomm’s intention to develop its own processor based on NUVIA technology. Qualcomm plans to launch chips with its own CPU architecture for notebook computers next year, but will not return to the data center market for the time being. Instead, Qualcomm will try to license the core based on the new architecture to other companies.Qualcomm tried to develop processors used in data centers many years ago and finally failed. Although the data center software ecosystem that is compatible with the ARM architecture has continued to develop in recent years, because ARM has provided Neoverse cores tailored specifically for data centers, the competition in this field has become more intense.

Cristiano Amon also said that Qualcomm and ARM have had a cooperative relationship for many years. If ARM can develop a better CPU architecture than Qualcomm itself, then Qualcomm will always choose to obtain a license from ARM.

Tags: