Qualcomm acquires Apple's former CPU designers

Qualcomm announced on January 13, 2021 (San Diego, California time), that they will acquire Nuvia for approximately USD 1.4 billion.

Qualcomm & Nuvia's logos

From Apple's A14 chip to Qualcomm's flagship chipsets

The startup company is named Nuvia, which is probably unfamiliar to many. To give you a quick background, the said company is spearheaded by Gerard Williams III, its CEO, and President, meanwhile, John Bruno and Manu Gulati are SVPs of engineering. 

The three worked at Apple for years, and two also at Google together. Their previous jobs also include ARM, ATI, AMD, TI, Broadcom, and others. They are considered industry veterans.

If you're still not convinced with their capability, let's take a look at the CEO's impressive credentials. Williams has worked at the Cortex-A8, A15, and other cores in his stay at ARM. Later on, he was the Chief Architect for Apple CPU and chipset development. 

Meet the Nuvia team (photo credit: Nuvia)

He then leads the work on core designs starting with the Cyclone and ending with Firestorm. To sum it up, this covers Apple's chips starting from the A7 all the way to the current A14—and he might have also been involved with the M1 as well. Bruno and Gulati were on his team until leaving in 2017.

Nuvia has a "proven world-class CPU and technology design team, with industry-leading expertise in high-performance processors, Systems on a Chip (SoC) and power management for compute-intensive devices and applications."

With the Nuvia team on board, Qualcomm may start using in-house designs again. Given the track records of the three veterans, Apple may finally have some competition.

You may want to take a look at the source link to check out some of the comments about Nuvia from Qualcomm's partners that include Samsung, Sony, Google, Microsoft, Acer, ASUS, etc.

Source: Qualcomm