How Qualcomm Tried and Failed To Steal Intel's Crown Jewel

An anonymous reader shares an article from Bloomberg: In early November, Qualcomm Chairman Paul Jacobs stood on a stage in the heart of Silicon Valley and vowed to break Intel's stranglehold on the world's most lucrative chip business. The mobile internet and cloud computing were booming and the data centers running this digital economy had an insatiable thirst for computer servers -- and especially the powerful, expensive server chips that Intel churns out by the million. Qualcomm had spent five years and hundreds of millions of dollars designing competing processors, trying to expand beyond its mobile business. Jacobs was leading a coming-out party featuring tech giants like Microsoft and HP, which had committed to try the new gear. "That's an industry that's been very slow moving, very complacent," Jacobs said on stage. "We're going to change that."

Less than a year later, this once-promising business is in tatters, according to people familiar with the situation. Most of the key engineers are gone. Big customers are looking elsewhere or going back to Intel for the data center chips they need. Efforts to sell the operation -- including a proposed management buyout backed by SoftBank -- have failed, the people said. Jacobs, chief backer of the plan and the son of Qualcomm's founder, is out, too. The demise is a story of debt-fueled dealmaking and executive cost-cutting pledges in the face of restless investors seeking quick returns -- exactly the wrong environment for the painstaking and expensive task of building a new semiconductor business from scratch. It leaves Qualcomm more reliant on a smartphone market that's plateaued. And Intel's server chip boss is happy.

Comments

They tried to steal the design of the Alpha?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Some of us remember how much of the design of the DEC Alpha was stolen by Intel for the Pentium. See https://www.nytimes.com/1997/0.... Between this and the theft of VMS technologies to create Windows NT, DEC went bankrupt and stopped producing new technologies to be stolen.

Re:They tried to steal the design of the Alpha?

[_merlin]

The Pentium Pro and Pentium MMX don't really look much like Alpha AXP. If anything, they look more like a desperate response to Sun. Pentium Pro copies conditional moves from SPARCv9 to help conserve branch prediction resources and avoid pipeline bubbles. MMX is a blatant rip-off of UltraSPARC's VIS - allow integer SIMD operations on values in FPU registers.

As for WinNT, it's not stolen. It implements a lot of ideas that had ended up in VMS because Cutler had previously worked on VMS. You can't stop someone from re-implementing their own ideas in a new product. The WinNT makes different compromises to VMS, with more focus on conserving resources, which makes sense for the commodity hardware it was supposed to run on.

Re:"Cloud Data Centers"

[Bert64]

Intel were never entrenched in the mobile/embedded market, the market basically grew around ARM. Intel tried and failed to enter this market.

Re:A Poorly Written Article

[Anonymous Coward]

So yeah. We all know the real problem - Intel exerting too much pressure on Microsoft.

Seriously, if Microsoft hadn't bowed to Intel, AMD would have had a HUGE head-start in the 64 bit world. Now, it's 2018, why hasn't Microsoft shipped Windows 10 on ARM? They have it working, so get the damn devices OUT THE DOOR.

Break the Intel monopoly. Microsoft needs Intel far, far less than Intel needs Microsoft.

This is about servers.

Microsoft isn't really a factor.