Qualcomm reportedly eyeing Intel’s PC design biz and more • The Register

Qualcomm reportedly goals to money in on Intel’s monetary woes by stripping the ailing chipmaker of elements.

Qualcomm is alleged to be taken with Intel’s shopper PC design enterprise, in accordance with unnamed sources cited in a Reuters report on Friday.

The cellular chip designer can also be rumored to be exploring different elements of the enterprise, however the server section in all probability will not be one in every of them, one supply instructed Reuters.

With the launch of its X Elite pocket book chips this spring, Qualcomm – a semiconductor goliath finest identified for designing Arm-based cellular chips utilized in smartphones and tablets – has grow to be a direct competitor to x86-slinger Intel.

It is not arduous to see why Intel’s PC design enterprise — which doubtless refers to a section liable for growing reference designs in collaboration with OEMs and never the chips themselves — might show to be a helpful asset for Qualcomm because it seems to develop into the PC section.

Once more, Qualcomm is all about Arm compatibility and to a level RISC-V, so no matter a part of Intel it might be taken with, we will not think about will probably be straight x86 cores.

There’s some precedent for this. Final 12 months, Intel shuttered its division liable for designing and planning out server grade techniques and offered off the blueprints to system builder MiTAC. Nevertheless, contemplating that Intel’s Shopper Computing Group was liable for greater than half of its product division revenues final quarter and is without doubt one of the few segments seeing year-over-year progress, a sale of even a small portion of that enterprise strikes us as unlikely.

An Intel spokesperson declined to touch upon hypothesis. We additionally reached out to Qualcomm, which has up to now declined to remark. In an announcement to the newswire earlier Intel mentioned it is “deeply dedicated to our PC enterprise,” and famous it hadn’t even heard from Qualcomm on this matter.

In line with a separate report by Bloomberg earlier this week, Intel’s monetary bother might drive it to divest from its Mobileye autonomous driving unit. The x86 big presently holds an 88 % stake within the enterprise which it took public in late 2022.

The report additionally claimed that Intel was additionally exploring its choices for its Community and Edge Group (NEX), which, as its title suggests, designs and manufactures chips utilized in quite a lot of community units together with NICs and different telecommunications kits.

These experiences come as Intel seems to shed greater than 15 % of its world workforce — roughly 16,000 staff by our estimates — following its disastrous Q2 earnings name in August. Mixed with main cuts to capex spending, Intel hopes these cutbacks will reserve it in extra of $10 billion in 2025.

CEO Pat Gelsinger is alleged to be weighing much more drastic measures to maintain the corporate afloat, together with promoting off or spinning out enterprise models like its FPGA biz Altera and even its floundering foundry division.

The chief exec will reportedly current these treatments to Intel’s board later this month, however plainly the vultures are already circling overhead. ®