Qualcomm acquires startup of former Apple employees to better compete vs. Apple

They lost their uarch team with Centriq's death, afaik.

However, unless if they want their 5G/future infrastructure chips/IP to be forever dependent on Intel, Marvell, etc, they still need a reasonably high performance CPU with a focus on throughput. Same with managed switches to a lessor degree, IMO.

So I view Nuvia's acquisition as trying to right the ship after Centriq's failure, more than trying to make another Cortex-A competitor. They might be mutual, of course, but I feel their focus is on network infrastructure, then DC, then client, when it comes to this acquisition.

Now they have a silicon/arch engineer leading the company, so hopefully they can hold onto the Nuvia folks after their contract(s) (from the acquisition) expire.