Qualcomm announced this Wednesday (13/1) the purchase of Bride, a processor startup formed by former employees of Apple. The operation cost US$ 1,4 billion (around R$ 7,4 billion) and aims, according to the manufacturer, to improve CPU performance in line with the demands of 5G technology.

“The Nuvia team is a proven innovator and, like Qualcomm, has a strong heritage of creating cutting-edge technology and products,” said Cristiano Amon, president and CEO-elect of the San Diego-based company. “Together, we are uniquely positioned to redefine computing and enable our ecosystem of partners to drive innovation and deliver a new class of products and experiences for the 5G era.”

Just over a year old, Nuvia was founded by three former processor engineers from Apple: Gerard Williams III, the company's current CEO, Manu Gulati and John Bruno. The three will join Qualcomm, as will the startup's entire portfolio of chips and modems. According to the website Crunchbase, which provides business information about private and public companies, Nuvia has fewer than 100 employees.

“Processor performance leadership will be critical to defining and delivering the next era of computing innovation,” said Williams, who was chief CPU architect at Apple for eight years. “The combination of Nuvia and Qualcomm will bring together the best engineering talent and resources to create a new class of high-performance computing platforms that will set the standard for our industry,” he said.

Qualcomm plans to use the startup's technology in a wide range of devices. release The manufacturer mentions that Nuvia's processors will power “smartphones, next-generation laptops and digital cockpits, as well as advanced driver assistance systems, extended reality and network infrastructure solutions”.

Dispute with the Apple

Qualcomm's purchase of Nuvia comes at a time of transformation in the chip market. Once dependent on hardware giants like AMD and Intel, companies like Apple and Amazon began building internal design teams to improve their physical processing systems. A hallmark of the new era was the end of the partnership between Apple with Intel, announced in June 2020.

Qualcomm's relationship with the Cupertino company has not been the best either. After a patent dispute that ended up in court in 2019, Apple would be developing your own modem for cell phones. Apparently, all to get rid of the partnership with the San Diego company, which ends in 2025.

In this scenario, buying Nuvia could be a good option for Qualcomm. This is because the startup is building a more flexible custom chip – based on the ARM architecture, like the Apple Silicon — which could result in a variety of CPUs in the coming years. Called Phoenix, the chip would give Qualcomm a big edge not just in data centers — where Intel still leads the pack — but in other areas.

“Our secret sauce is physical design features and microarchitecture,” Williams told “VentureBeat”, last year. “That’s where you see differentiation come into play for anyone building a processor.”

What is clear, however, is that behind the 5G discourse, Qualcomm is concerned about Apple. The inclusion of statements from companies like Microsoft in the official statement and the acquisition itself indicate a reaction by Qualcomm to the growing perception that the company's new chips Apple would outperform the rest of the competition.

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