Friday, September 20th 2024
Qualcomm Said to Have Approached Intel About Takeover Bid
This is not an April fool, as Qualcomm has apparently approached Intel with a takeover bid, according to the Wall Street Journal. The news follows earlier rumours about Qualcomm having eyed the opportunity to buy parts of Intel's client PC business, especially the parts related to chip design. Now it looks like Qualcomm has decided it might as well give it a go and take over Intel entirely, if the WSJ's sources can be trusted. It's still early days though and no official offers appear to have been proposed by Qualcomm so far and it doesn't appear to be a hostile takeover offer at this point in time. As such, this could turn out to be nothing, or we could see a huge change in the chip market if something comes of it.
It's worth keeping in mind that Intel's share price has dropped by around 57 percent so far this year—not taking into account today's small jump for Intel—and Qualcomm's market cap stands at over twice that of Intel's at 188 vs 93 billion US dollars. Even if Intel was to agree to a takeover offer from Qualcomm, there are several antitrust hurdles in multiple countries to get around for the two giants as well. This is despite the two not being direct competitors, but with Qualcomm recently having entered the Windows laptop market, the two are at least competing for some market share there. It's also unclear what Qualcomm would do with Intel's x86 legacy if it acquired Intel, as Qualcomm might not be interested in keeping it, at least not on the consumer side of its business. Time will tell if this is just some advanced speculation or a serious consideration by Qualcomm.
Sources:
The Wall Street Journal (paywall), Reuters
It's worth keeping in mind that Intel's share price has dropped by around 57 percent so far this year—not taking into account today's small jump for Intel—and Qualcomm's market cap stands at over twice that of Intel's at 188 vs 93 billion US dollars. Even if Intel was to agree to a takeover offer from Qualcomm, there are several antitrust hurdles in multiple countries to get around for the two giants as well. This is despite the two not being direct competitors, but with Qualcomm recently having entered the Windows laptop market, the two are at least competing for some market share there. It's also unclear what Qualcomm would do with Intel's x86 legacy if it acquired Intel, as Qualcomm might not be interested in keeping it, at least not on the consumer side of its business. Time will tell if this is just some advanced speculation or a serious consideration by Qualcomm.
102 Comments on Qualcomm Said to Have Approached Intel About Takeover Bid
I also don't quite see how nvidia buying intel would be the same situation as their failed attempt to purchase ARM. It seems like a different situation to me? ARM has been licensing its ISA to a whole raft of companies and nvidia is well known for its business practices, so there was the fear that nvidia would attempt to create a monopoly and lock down the architecture. There exists no such fear with the X86 ISA because it is already locked down. Intel doesn't license it to anyone apart from the standing agreements with AMD. As long as nvidia honored the licensing agreements with AMD (which they would most probably be forced to do, considering these are cross-licensing agreements, and involve AMD's 64-bit extensions, too), it seems to me that an intel buyout by nvidia would face less scrutiny than the arm buyout attempt? What am I missing here?
IFS is separate when it has its own CEO, has its own IPO and stock symbol, files quarterly earnings report separate from Intel and becomes a legally separate business entity.
Intel's only reason to play accounting tricks to make it seem they split off IFS is to get orders from Apple, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc. without conflict of interest. That has not happened and will not happen. Intel WILL sabotage any chip orders received from these companies in order to give them a leg up in the market. This is why Intel has received close to ZERO chip orders from other companies. The proof is in the pudding as they say. Only people like you play into the subterfuge but unfortunately for Intel, you are not in charge of a large chip design firm.
Doesn't matter if they are publicly traded, USA gov will simply put the foot down. Sure they can be carved up a bit, force to make some changes, etc. - but Uncle Sam needs them under control and they WILL be under control.
Qualcomm is trying to get into the PC market. But that's Intel most profitable business. Selling it is completely nonsensical.
Which lead us to Mobileye (automotive) and Altera (infrastructure). Qualcomm has presence in both markets. If there's any substance to this news, i think It'll be about Mobileye or Altera.
When AI bubble deflates, if it ever deflates or in case other hardware becomes preferred to GPUs, Nvidia can still take over the market thanks to it's superior GPUs and the power it can exercise on the market. A SoC with ARM cores and Nvidia iGPU could become easily a huge success in the market tomorrow. A platform with an Nvidia CPU and an Nvidia GPU that will be exclusive to that platform could also manage to get a portion of enthusiast gamers. Windows on ARM seems to be working this time and I bet that whatever Qualcomm can build today to run Windows on ARM and games on PCs, Nvidia can do it many times better and faster. As for AMD, unfortunately as we can see in the GPU business they can't fight Nvidia. AMD will come to an agreement eventually with Nvidia, or Nvidia might decide to start a price war in GPUs that Radeon wouldn't be able to fight. Nvidia is way too powerful today, that's why it wasn't allowed to take over ARM. And if US considers x86 extremely important, that's a reason for Qualcomm to not get Intel or AMD. Because Qualcomm probably wouldn't be interested to keep investing on x86.
The are behind on the software part but are working on it (ROCm vs CUDA). Example, their MI300X parts are faster than the targeted competitor (H100).
On the top 10 supercomputers, they hold several spots, including the first one.
The problem with gamers is that we now have these influencers that don’t educate consumers into not falling for non platform agnostic tech and instead praise such things. Just see how none of them, ever, make any such warnings about dlss?
Or overhype tech that its still not entirely ready for mass consumption, like RT.
I can go on, but I’m already gone way off topic.
Intel is not special. Not anymore. And not ever again.A good example of this is how AMD has and is beating Intel. :)
So, Nvidia can move the market in any direction they want and it is one of the reasons why I was insisting that Intel will NEVER abandon gaming GPUs no matter how bad ARC is doing in sales, when others had it certain that Intel will abandon it's efforts because it was bleeding money. Because tomorrow Nvidia can say "I have a new ARM platform for desktop and laptop PCs and all my new high end and enthusiast cards will be released primary on that platform and only many months later on x86 platforms. And because i am using a new proprietary interface, they will perform better on my ARM based platform while also being cheaper than the ones sold for the x86 platform". AMD could follow with something similar on AM6 or AM7 and Intel end up being the poor platform for business PCs, lacking GPU power to compete in other markets. That's why we hear left and right that Intel might sold this part of the business, or that part of the business but NO ONE says anything about Intel dropping discrete GPUs. It's way to important today.
That's what I mean they can't fight Nvidia. Nvidia totally controls the GPU market.