Qualcomm is apparently planning a return to the server chip market. The company is overhauling its CPU offering after acquiring new chip design company Nuvia in 2021. Nuvia was founded by three senior engineers from Apple’s chip division, with the original goal of designing ARM server chips (although it never launched a product). . After Qualcomm bought the company, it looked like it was changing its new chip division from server chips to laptops and phones. Now, according to a new report from Bloomberg, Nuvia’s original goal of building server chips may continue.
The report says Qualcomm is “seeking customers for a product resulting from its purchase of chip startup Nuvia last year” with Amazon Web Services being one of the first companies to “agree to review Qualcomm’s offerings.” Apple has proven to the world that ARM chips can scale, and laptops have been proven to be more efficient than Intel and AMD’s x86 chips. Companies like Amazon have even started making their in-house server chips based on ARM’s licensable CPU designs.
Doing better than ARM’s off-the-shelf CPU designs will be the real challenge for Qualcomm. Despite Qualcomm having a near monopoly on high-end Android phone CPUs, it’s not quite a Processor company. Qualcomm SoCs include CPUs directly from ARM, as do many other vendors such as Mediatek, Samsung and HiSilicon from Huawei. What keeps Qualcomm at the top is all the non-CPU parts, especially the hyper-aggressive licensing around its modems and mobile patients. Qualcomm owns enough basic cell phone patents that you need a license from them to sell a phone no matter what, and by bundling a cheaper patent license with its own chips, Qualcomm can knock out the competition. Qualcomm does a good job of GPUs and modem design, but it has never paid much attention to the CPU portion of its SoC offering and is currently several generations behind the market leader, Apple.
In the server market, Qualcomm’s business will not be artificially supported by mobile licenses. This is a non-CPU company that suddenly decides to sell CPUs, and those products will have to compete on their own merits. With potential customers like Amazon already building ARM chips, it’s 100 percent on Nuvia to deliver a CPU that’s better than the stock ARM designs.
Qualcomm last attempted to break into the server market in 2017, when it spent a short year building “Centriq” server chips for Microsoft. That division was shut down due to a failed hostile takeover of Broadcom. However, it was canceled under a previous CEO and current Qualcomm boss Cristiano Amon is looking to diversify Qualcomm’s product line. Nuvia CEO Gerard Williams, who was Apple’s former chief CPU architect for nearly a decade, is now Qualcomm’s SVP of Engineering. If Nuvia chip designs are half as successful as Apple’s leading chips, Qualcomm could become a major competitor to server chips.
There’s no timeline for when Qualcomm’s server chips will be available, but according to Qualcomm’s current schedule, Nuvia technology will appear in laptops in “late 2023.”
