Qualcomm acquires Apple’s former chief architect
- Gerard Williams founded Nuvia, the company that Qualcomm acquired.
- It was a $1.4 billion acquisition.
- Qualcomm plans to become a strong competitor to Apple with this deal.
Recently, Qualcomm announced a $1.4 billion deal to acquire chip design firm Nuvia. Nuvia is a novice company originally founded by former Apple silicon executive Gerard Williams III, along with Manu Gulati and John Bruno back in 2019.
Mr. Gerard Williams was the chief architect behind all of Apple’s A series silicon chips from 2010 to 2019. His profile highlights that he worked on different silicon projects code-named Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane, Monsoon, Vortex, Lightning and Firestorm CPUs. These CPUs were featured in Apple’s A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12 series, A13, and A14 respectively. It points out that he also worked at ARM from 1998 to 2010 on different CPU tech like the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A15 CPU cores. Williams was even the chief architect for Apple CPU and SOC development.
Qualcomm is the parent company behind Snapdragon, a popular SoC which can be found in most Android devices. It was announced that the reason behind Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia is their industry-leading expertise in “high performance processors, Systems on a Chip and power management for compute-intensive devices and applications.” They plan to integrate Nuvia’s CPUs across a wide lineup of products which will power a wide range of portable devices such as smartphones, tablets and notebooks.
The San Diego firm even plans to power next generation laptops with the integration of Nuvia’s technology which could help in gaining a major performance boost for Windows on ARM laptops. This sounds like a big competition for Apple’s M series Macs. Only time will tell who stands as a winner in this competition of Apple vs. Qualcomm.
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