Google wanted to buy Nuvia according to a recent report, which could mean something completely different for the Pixel series.
Last year, Qualcomm bought Nuvia, a startup headed by former employees of Google and Apple. Nuvia was working on custom Arm silicon, and Qualcomm wanted it so it could better compete with Apple. For context, one of Nuvia’s heads was considered the “chief engineer” of the Apple Silicon M1 chipset. report from the information (which also reported that Apple had problems with the next-generation GPU it was designing for the A16 Bionic) Nuvia allegedly became a takeover target for a number of different companies, Google among them.
This is particularly interesting because it’s very likely that part of the reason Google is going after Nuvia is its Tensor chips. Google’s Tensor effort for Pixel smartphones gives it little control over the SoCs that go into its smartphones, but having its own chip designers with custom Arm cores ready to go means it will no longer need to rely on Samsung and its Exynos chips for reference designs in the future. Two of Nuvia’s co-founders previously worked at Google as well, with one of them playing the role of “Lead SoC Engineer”; It is very likely Tensor.
The work done by Nuvia can already be seen in the form of the Qualcomm Oryon, which builds on the work done at Nuvia. When asked about a statement regarding whether Oryon is the Nuvia chipset that the company was previously working on, the spokesperson said the following.
Nuvia engineers started creating our custom CPU while they were working at Nuvia, and after the acquisition of Nuvia by Qualcomm Technologies, the custom CPU was completed by engineers at Qualcomm Technologies.
This may sound like two different teams worked on it, but in reality, these Nuvia engineers simply became Qualcomm engineers. Not only did the purchase by Google mean that the company had access to the ingenuity of a world-class team familiar with SoCs (with a chipset almost ready to go already), it could mean that the Tensor SoC was just focused on something like another Pixelbook.
Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia ran into some difficulties. Arm sued Qualcomm for breach of its license agreement, alleging that Qualcomm is trying to use Arm’s existing license for Nuvia without the proper rights. Arm claims its licenses are not transferable through acquisition, although Qualcomm has argued that it has its own Arm licenses that allow the use of its custom processors.
Source: the information
Through: 9to5Google
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