Meanwhile x86 has maintained backwards compat for (checks calendar) yeah decades. Literally decades. With standards up the wazoo to avoid the disaster that is the Arm ecosystem without UEFI or something like it.

Every Arm SoC being a snowflake needing special attention by the OS is a huge hassle. There's a reason there's no simplified Arm installer for operating systems.

Intel squandered its dominance on the CPU market for decades. Qalcomm sucking the remaining life of it would be a fitting end for a player that lost its way.

Wonder if the increasing backwards compatibility became too much to bear, but IMO it never really tried to tread new grounds for risk of losing a comfortable position.

Qualcomm's RF design is best in class. This is their bread and butter and they have been consistently good at it forever.

Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not because Qualcomm is bad.

It bears in mind that just because you are good at one thing does not imply you will be good at another. For instance, Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product or various entities trying to produce MIPS and ARM products failing time and time again.

Companies should do what they say they're going to do, but these dev kits are an example of something that's relevant to HN but not to Qualcomm's business.

When this platform was heralded as the “AI” desktop, I pre-ordered both the dev kit and a laptop. Like many of you, I’ve experienced a months-long delay in the delivery of the dev kits. Although I STILL don't have my devkit, I received my laptop pretty much on time. -- and I quickly discovered that despite Windows on ARM (WOA) being over a decade old, the support for open-source tooling is as complete as Swiss cheese. Key Python modules are missing, and even the Git command-line (git bash) client isn’t functional yet!

I mean, forget about basic open-source development, let alone performing AI inference work on your new Snapdragon laptop.

After some digging, I’ve learned that just four overworked developers in Prague make up the core team unclogging this tooling dependency log-jam. Gah!

For what it’s worth, WSL2 (Linux on Windows) actually runs quite impressively on the Snapdragon X.

... Intel wasn't able to ship on EUV, so they would be in great company.

[dead]

Not plausible. I worked at Qualcomm for several years in engineering and office of the chief scientist, and that would be insane inversion of division headcounts.

Qualcomm makes lots of their money by holding a monopoly on wireless chip patents. They use lawyers to bully other companies out of the space.

You can compare this with the patent wars of the companies in Silicon Valley which came to halt when the orgs realized they were effectively giving money to lawyers instead of innovating.

Qualcomm doesn’t really have real competition in Southern California. It’s cheaper for them to bully smaller companies with lawyers than employ more engineers (not sure if it’s possible to employ more engineers in the wireless space regardless).

You could also argue Qualcomms success is related to the other companies which reside around them. They have effectively built an “office moat” with their wireless patents.

No way, 4x?!

Deals can be amended for $$

The idea is to keep the number of x86 suppliers low, but enough patents are expired already you could probably make an x86_64 avx2 era cpu without asking

US gov already put 20Bn into Intels fabs.

They might just split and sell off the cpu and gpu divisions and keep the rest of Intel's (very wide) portfolio. Of particular interest might be the Intel foundries.

The issue long term is that Lunar Lake is built on TSMC, so Intel is netting a fraction per chip of what they'd make if they made it themselves.

Intel is currently investing $7B a quarter into getting their foundries competitive again, and it's not clear yet that they'll be able to really do so at scale. And even if they do, it's not clear whether those foundries can effectively serve customers that aren't Intel.

The reason people trust TSMC to make their chips is because TSMC isn't making a competing chip. If I come to an Intel Foundry with my design and work with them to spin up some new capability to get the features to work right, there isn't much of anything that stops Intel Chips from using that new capability to compete with me in a year.

> Their innovation abilities have been lacking

And Qualcomm's haven't? What did they really design besides the Snapdragon X Elite in the last 10+ years?

> but I hope it happens

So more industry concentration and even less competition would somehow be a good thing?

A... single patent? No, there are licensing agreements for that.

How exactly would a foreign power block two US companies from merging when it has no significant stock holding in either?

What would motivate this

If you look at the financial statements, it's quite the opposite however?

Their chips made on TSMC process are doing quite well and IFS has failed to secure worthwhile external customers and is losing money in their expansion hand over first.

> flagging chips business

Is it "flagging", though? Intel still seems to be pretty good at designing chips and their next gen laptop chips (made at TSMC) are allegedly more power efficient than the Snapdragon Elite (of course remains to be seen). It's the foundry that's dragging down.