Nuvia

History

2021: Qualcomm purchased Nuvia for $1.4 billion

On January 13, 2021 Qualcomm announced acquisition of Nuvia for $1.4 billion. The buyer intends to integrate technologies of a startup with mobile processors Snapdragon which are used in the majority Android- devices worldwide.

After closing of the transaction founders of Nuvia Gerard Williams of III (Gerard Williams III, before about 10 years he headed department of development of processors in Apple), Manu Gulati and John Bruno will pass into Qualcomm. Their new positions by January 13, 2021 are not called.

Qualcomm purchased Nuvia for $1.4 billion

As notes the SiliconANGLE edition, considering start of Nuvia in 2019, sale of a startup for investors will begin a fast method to pay back investments and it is essential to earn. For lifetime of this developer of chips $293 million were invested in it in total. It is very large sum for the beginning company, but, most likely, Nuvia is helped by the record of service of founders (they worked in Apple, Google, AMD) and promising technologies.

The head of department of Windows Devices and Experiences in Microsoft Panos Panay company (Panos Panay) positively apprehended news about purchase of Nuvia and expressed the hopes that the future chips of Qualcomm will be able to expand possibilities of Windows computers with ARM processors. Importance of the transaction for Qualcomm is also that the company will be able to reduce the dependence on ARM which is purchased by one of her main competitors — Nvidia.

The matter is that the architecture created according to the license ARM is the cornerstone of the majority of chips of Qualcomm. Nuvia also uses ARM technologies, but the design of cores develops independently. Using Nuvia the Qualcomm company will be able to lower runtime royalty fees of ARM in the short term, and in further it will help it with creation of the competing architecture.^[1]

2020: Attraction of $240 million investments

At the end of September, 2020 the startup of Nuvia attracted $240 million to development of the innovation server processors. Though Nuvia has no product prototype, names of founders of a startup drew attention of investors - all of them were top managers of Apple earlier.

The chief executive officer Gerard Williams of III (Gerard Williams III) held nearly ten years a position of the chief architect of the central processor of Apple while his cofounders Manu Gulati and John Bruno held the leading engineering positions in Apple.

The developer of server processors founded by the former top managers of Apple who twice quicker than modern, attracted $240 million investments

Founders of Nuvia stake on the fact that they will be able to apply methods and lessons of the mobile industry in data processing centers. The startup develops the fast server processor on the basis of architecture of ARM. According to creators, the chip which will integrate the central processor with other computing modules will appear twice quicker than the processors which are already presented at the market. Moreover, developers consider that their processors will consume no more than a third of the energy required for work of products of Intel.

Energy efficiency - the central principle of value proposition of Nuvia. The startup claims that at modern cooling systems in data centers the quantity of the electric power which the server can consume without overheating usually reaches 250-300 W. If electricity consumption by a chip decreases, much more cores of processing can work on the server that increases the greatest possible system performance.

The startup shared only very short description of the technology so far. The server Phoenix processor is created on the basis of architecture of ARM which is also used by Apple as a basis for iPhone processors. The promised performance measures are received during tests simulations, but not real tests, but results were rather convincing for investors.^[2]

Notes