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Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

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Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#81

Post by 10000truths »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #74
loeg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ISA isn't what makes x86 easier for operating systems to support than ARM SoCs. It's things like generic ACPICA instead of hardcoded devicetrees.

Some ARM systems (mainly servers) do support ACPI; allowing for one image to run on multiple processors and devices. However… ACPI is apparently a pretty awful thing to implement. When it doesn’t work, or mistakes are made (looking at my own 13th gen HP laptop right now - borked ACPI tables means unpatchable broken sleep on Linux), then it’s pure frustration. Device trees on the other hand are much more binary. Eithe…

Flawed implementations of open specs can be worked around with things like quirk tables. A spec held hostage by a non-cooperating vendor cannot. In the world of ARM SoCs, bad vendors won't even provide a device tree, just a binary image compiled from a patched kernel.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#82

Post by MichaelNolan »

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…

> Apple … has been working on it in secret for years.

I keep hoping Apple will release a MacBook with a 5G chipset. The rumors are saying their in house one will ready in 2026 at the earliest. It sure seems like a long road given they bought the intel RF division in 2019.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#83

Post by jjtheblunt »

MattGrommes wrote: post #24

Qualcomm consists of at least 4 lawyers for every engineer. If this happens expect a lot more lawsuits making anything involving hardware much more expensive for everybody.

Not plausible. I worked at Qualcomm for several years in engineering and office of the chief scientist, and that would be insane inversion of division headcounts.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#84

Post by snitty »

MichaelNolan wrote: post #82
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…

> Apple … has been working on it in secret for years. I keep hoping Apple will release a MacBook with a 5G chipset. The rumors are saying their in house one will ready in 2026 at the earliest. It sure seems like a long road given they bought the intel RF division in 2019.

My understanding is that Intel's chips weren't great and making power efficient 5g chips is wildly difficult. Thus ends my understanding of these issues, though.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#85

Post by knowitnone »

bfrog wrote: post #51
GeekyBear wrote: post #47

After a decade of being assured that the short support window for Android devices had a root cause in the lack of support device makers received from Qualcomm, they are the last company that I want to see buy Intel.

Meanwhile x86 has maintained backwards compat for (checks calendar) yeah decades. Literally decades. With standards up the wazoo to avoid the disaster that is the Arm ecosystem without UEFI or something like it. Every Arm SoC being a snowflake needing special attention by the OS is a huge hassle. There's a reason there's no simplified Arm installer for operating systems.

there's no simplified Linux installer either and every distro creates one and keeps re-inventing it

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#88

Post by snitty »

onepointsixC wrote: post #57

A sale isn’t going to happen. Intel has had a rough quarter but their lunar lake launch looks promising, beating Qualcomm’s offerings on battery life and performance.

The issue long term is that Lunar Lake is built on TSMC, so Intel is netting a fraction per chip of what they'd make if they made it themselves.

Intel is currently investing $7B a quarter into getting their foundries competitive again, and it's not clear yet that they'll be able to really do so at scale. And even if they do, it's not clear whether those foundries can effectively serve customers that aren't Intel.

The reason people trust TSMC to make their chips is because TSMC isn't making a competing chip. If I come to an Intel Foundry with my design and work with them to spin up some new capability to get the features to work right, there isn't much of anything that stops Intel Chips from using that new capability to compete with me in a year.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#89

Post by Narhem »

slt2021 wrote: post #69
Narhem wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm makes lots of their money by holding a monopoly on wireless chip patents. They use lawyers to bully other companies out of the space. You can compare this with the patent wars of the companies in Silicon Valley which came to halt when the orgs realized they were effectively giving money to lawyers instead of innovating. Qualcomm doesn’t really have real competition in Southern California. It’s cheaper for th…

so Qualcomm is basically Oracle?

Sort of, in Northern California there was a lot of office space.

In San Diego most of the land zoned for office space is owned by the Jacob brothers (although not directly connected to Qualcomm anymore). Imagine if Google and Apple had to rent their campuses from Oracle.

Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel

#90

Post by osnium123 »

tippytippytango wrote: post #64

Apple, c’mon. Get in there and just buy intel. Get the foundry working, spin out x86 into its own legacy, fabless business unit. Make your own chips, it’s only 100B!!

It’s very hard to get semiconductor factories to work. In almost all cases, it’s better to let the professionals at TSMC to do the fab than to rely on newbies to the foundry industry.
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