Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel • Hacker News Board

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#101

Post by Woodi » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 11:23 AM UTC

How are MS and Qualcomm finances related ? They look like good budies with no visible reason. And if they are close then MS can have their own cpus. Win4ever !!!11 :)

But it's possible plain silicon is outdated and Intel stuff was splitted for a reason, eg. "photonics" part goes to "datacenter" division, fabs can be spun off and re-named any second.

But it's USoA ! - if you win military contract you live OK for few years and do not sell out suddenly like Sun - they did it just instantly after loosing military contract. Or maybe they (Sun managers) was preparing it 2 years ahead when dey bought Mysql :) Just theoretising :)

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#102

Post by Wytwwww » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 1:08 PM UTC

jprd wrote: post #59

Wytwwww wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to design the best 5G modems when you're are almost (effectively) the only company that's legally allowed to make them. They are basically a monopoly... Intel would be doing much better as well if they didn't have to share x86 with AMD and could sue ARM into oblivion...

I imagine Apple would disagree.

We'll never really know though, will we? Or are you claiming that the endless patent related lawsuits (going both ways) had no impact on Intel's/Apple's efforts?

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#103

Post by geerlingguy » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 1:20 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #52

freehorse wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you expect your products to have good software support by developers then?

Snapdragon laptops have been available for a few weeks already. Although laptops cost more than this dev kit they're also more usable as a daily driver. If Qualcomm wants real adoption they'd send them out for free, not require devs to pay.

Dev shops would rather not have piles of laptops with batteries to maintain sitting in their racks/shelves for build and remote testing.

For individual devs laptops are fine, usually, but there's also no solid "reference" platform, since all the laptops are targeting different consumer lines.

That's a bit beside the point though, the Dev kits should've come out months before the consumer products were launched... and failing that at the same time.

Qualcomm and Arrow said the units would ship "tomorrow" in July... and it took over a month (after accepting many orders) before they even updated the stock to a more realistic timeframe, late September.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#104

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #68

cowmix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the success of this new platform is how fast devs can adapt / fix their apps to work natively. Apple, for instance, provided dev mules for OSX ARM --- and their rollout of Apple Silicon was smoother than anyone could have hoped. Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.

> Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now. Internally, nearly 20 years. It was kept alive for a long time by a single individual as a side project. When I first got out of college I actually helped update tests that were being used for it (I maintained the ARM compiler test harness, and it was being used for some Windows on ARM stuff as well). Microsoft has never went fully in on ar…

To be fair to Microsoft Apple did have the advantage of controlling the stack from top to bottom.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#105

Post by static_motion » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 4:42 PM UTC

kev009 wrote: post #36

geerlingguy wrote: post #10

Qualcomm still hasn't shipped any of the Snapdragon X dev kits, two months and counting. If they can't deliver on their promises (that and CoPilot PCs having very disappointing sales), how could they do anything besides further drag down Intel? Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1]) [1] https://appleinsider.com/…

Qualcomm's RF design is best in class. This is their bread and butter and they have been consistently good at it forever. Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not becau…

> Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product

That's an interesting statement, as their Wi-Fi cards are some of the best on the market and common laptop-purchasing wisdom says to buy anything with an Intel Wi-Fi adapter and avoid everything else.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#106

Post by rlyno » Sun, Sep 22, 2024, 4:28 AM UTC

Varloom wrote: post #79

ASalazarMX wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel squandered its dominance on the CPU market for decades. Qalcomm sucking the remaining life of it would be a fitting end for a player that lost its way. Wonder if the increasing backwards compatibility became too much to bear, but IMO it never really tried to tread new grounds for risk of losing a comfortable position.

Qualcomm main business is mobile phone chips and 5g modems. Majority of it's revenue goes to Taiwan for TSMC as margins. Having Intel fab, will cut the middle man, and revenue will skyrocket, all while no money leaves the USA.

Qualcomm should buy capacity from Intel, Intel can wind down x86 slowly as it shifts to foundry (implementation of the how is Intel’s core engineering product this whole time)

A monolith will drag both down

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#107

Post by nativeit » Sun, Sep 22, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #94

Strange timing - Qualcomm just announced hundreds of layoffs literally yesterday: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/chipmaker-qualcomm-lays-of...

This doesn’t mean they’re broke, it just means they don’t value institutional memory and experience as much as they do cash and dividends.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#108

Post by kev009 » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 5:43 AM UTC

static_motion wrote: post #105

kev009 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm's RF design is best in class. This is their bread and butter and they have been consistently good at it forever. Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not becau…

> Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product That's an interesting statement, as their Wi-Fi cards are some of the best on the market and common laptop-purchasing wisdom says to buy anything with an Intel Wi-Fi adapter and avoid everything else.

I was talking more about wireline networking there, which are all rife with silicon errata and fairly shoddy drivers (which is sadly the norm in the industry). Most of the damage is mitigated in i.e. upstream Linux but it's not pretty and if you are doing datacenter networking you are much better off with Mellanox(nvidia) or Chelsio (a small but mighty player with interesting capabilities) who have good chips and good drivers.

On the 802.11 wireless front, intel maintains a marked advantage in having inbox drivers in Linux by the time you need them. I would take an ath11k/ath12k over equivalent Intel parts but Qualcomm's driver upstreaming process takes way too long while Intel tends to integrate before the products are generally available.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#109

Post by StillBored » Tue, Sep 24, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

kev009 wrote: post #36

geerlingguy wrote: post #10

Qualcomm still hasn't shipped any of the Snapdragon X dev kits, two months and counting. If they can't deliver on their promises (that and CoPilot PCs having very disappointing sales), how could they do anything besides further drag down Intel? Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1]) [1] https://appleinsider.com/…

Qualcomm's RF design is best in class. This is their bread and butter and they have been consistently good at it forever. Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not becau…

How quickly we forget Huawei... QC's fine, but I think the huawei situation shows that QC has probably been getting a little fat/lazy on the modem side for a few years too. Only a real competitor could prove that if true, 2013 intel looked like they were best in class too but the rot was already firmly entrenched.

So, I wouldn't say intel's modems were awful, maybe not as good as the QC's of the time, but it could just have been immature, and underfunded. Apple OTOH, is famous for taking somewhat failed teams and having a long enough vision to create great products. They seem to understand that 9 women can't create a baby in 1 month and are willing to keep iterating until its right if it solves a problem for them.