
How Qualcomm Tried and Failed to Steal Intel's Crown Jewel - ItsTotallyOn
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-20/qualcomm-s-bid-to-chase-intel-in-servers-fell-victim-to-broadcom
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phkahler
>> However, Chandrasekher had earlier brokered a deal with the Chinese
province of Guizhou to fund part of Qualcomm’s server chip work. In return,
the local government demanded the transfer of chip designs and exclusive
rights to sell the processors in China.

This is common and the reason people say we don't have free trade with China.
Many companies have made such short sighted deals which will be the death of
US economic strength if it's allowed to continue.

~~~
majia
China is not banning Qualcomm from selling chips in China if Qualcomm doesn’t
give up its design, but simply offers a deal that Qualcomm can choose to
accept or not. One may argue whether the deal is good for US economy strength,
but it is still free trade.

~~~
ksec
Would it still be free trade if all your design and IP you give up to not the
Chinese JV but "Chinese" in general, and they then uses all all those learning
into something of their own?

And no, you cant sue them.

~~~
majia
It’s a breach of contract, and it’s wrong. However, when Qualcomm sells its
tech, it should factor in this counterparty risk and decide if it is still
worth it.

I’m not defending this kind of inexcusable behavior; I’m just suggesting free
trade means Qualcomm or any private business can make its own decision.

~~~
cjblomqvist
As long as I'm not misunderstanding you, it seems you are confusing free trade
with free to make a decision or not. Free trade means you are able to sell (or
buy) things across borders free from government intervention. In this case,
the government says you can only sell if you pay a form of tax (paid by IP
rather than money).

In particular, what people believe is unfair is how these barriers are applied
unequal. If Chinese companies want to sell to the US, it's free of such
hinders. The other way around, on the other hand, it's not. (obviously this is
not true considering the latest tolls and what not, but that's the core
premise anyway).

Btw. Compare this to a situation when somebody is asking you to kill someone,
or they'll kill you. You're free to make a decision, but not necessarily free
as what people usually refer to when talking about freedom.

Source:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade)

~~~
majia
I do agree with you on the general notion of free trade. But in this
particular case, there is no mention of any barrier imposed on qualcomm
products; the deal is about jointly creating a new product. What I disagree is
claiming free trade while suggesting qualcomm should not do certain deals for
national interest reasons.

~~~
phkahler
>> But in this particular case, there is no mention of any barrier imposed on
qualcomm products; the deal is about jointly creating a new product.

There is no mention, but often what happens is a company wants to do business
in china and is told no while being presented an offer like this.

>> What I disagree is claiming free trade while suggesting qualcomm should not
do certain deals for national interest reasons.

I agree with you that a company is free to make decisions any way it wants
within the law. This is why we have ITAR to protect against weapons tech going
to the wrong places. But if the US took a similar position with regard to
other tech besides war-making, these deals wouldn't be legal. I wouldn't
suggest we're having an economic war, but all nations are in economic
competition and the stakes are potentially very high.

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rwmj
It's a shame because the Centriq[0] was objectively an excellent and very fast
chip. Last year I was doing make -j46 kernel builds[1], but even single core
performance felt better than Xeon. And then they dropped it out of the blue in
about May this year.

[0] Codenamed Hawker and Amberwing, based on the Falkor core:
[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/microarchitectures/fal...](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/microarchitectures/falkor)

[1] [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/make-j46-kernel-
builds...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/make-j46-kernel-builds-on-
qualcomm-amberwing/)

~~~
swiley
Did they actually publish the data sheets for this one? Is there mainline
kernel support?

~~~
rwmj
There is mainline kernel support. I don't know about how much is published as
data sheets but it's basically an ARMv8 processor with GICv3 which boots using
completely standard SBSA/SBBR. It currently boots using a standard Linus
kernel.

They gave out a bunch of servers to many companies including Red Hat (where I
work), but I don't think they ever made it to retail. That's a shame because
they are/were spectacular CPUs.

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evanweaver
Bizarrely breathless and short-sighted article when Intel has fallen so far
behind in process shrinks and AMD multi-core is on the rise.

~~~
sometimesijust
This is an objectively bad article. I'm still trying to figure out exactly
which November the author is talking about. But I do think there is an
interesting story in there if it was written by a better journalist with
some/any actual insider information.

~~~
abainbridge
Agreed.

I'm still trying to figure out which Qualcomm product the author is talking
about. Does it exist? Was it bad? Did people buy it? If not, why?

I don't believe the author's justification as to why Qualcomm was in the best
position to make a success of an ARM server chip - there's a quote from a
Gartner analyst and the assertion that you need a product road-map. What? Is
that it? Surely the important thing is to make a good chip, make it cheap and
produce enough to meet demand. Do that consistently for two years and the big
cloud vendors will start buying. I don't think you need to be Qualcomm to
achieve that.

Why couldn't a startup company break into this market? For example, this one
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ampere-e...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ampere-
eMAG-32-Cores)

~~~
Tempest1981
Maybe this:

“the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 features up to 48 Qualcomm Falkor cores—our custom
Armv8-based CPU core”

[https://www.qualcomm.com/products/server-
processors](https://www.qualcomm.com/products/server-processors)

------
fredliu
Qualcomm has been facing multi-front battles in the past few years: Apple
Lawsuit, NXP deal nixed, Broadcom hostile take over, China problem, Regulator
problems, Board In-fights, pressure from activist investor to "cut cost"/split
the licensing business... etc, etc. Making the arm server business from 0 to a
commercial hit would be too much to ask. Although it did have the best chance.

------
profquail
I was disappointed to hear about QCOM shuttering the team building the
Centriq, it seemed really promising. At least there’s still (on the ARM server
frontier) Cavium ThunderX2, with which GigaByte recently started rolling out
ARM servers and workstations. (Of course, there’s still also AMD, OpenPOWER,
etc. in terms of data center competition for Intel.)

~~~
floatboth
Yes, Cavium has been kicking ass. There's also Ampere's new eMAG thing. And
HiSilicon server chips exist… somewhere.
([https://www.worksonarm.com/cluster/](https://www.worksonarm.com/cluster/)
apparently has some)

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slivym
>Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon said the company has "right-sized" the
server business for the market opportunities.

I hate this corporate speak. 100% of the time this means that they fucked
something up and they're going to can the entire thing because they've re-set
their expected market share to 0. The only reason they don't state they've
canned it is so that schmuck investors and engineers don't realize the project
is dead.

The size they are now isn't "Right-sized" for the opportunity, it's "right-
sized" for a project that missed the opportunity, and to pretend that the
original investment wasn't the right size is just white washing bad management
decisions.

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partingshots
Seems like the tides have turned on this one, with Intel stealing Qualcomm’s
breadwinner modem business, thanks to the help of Apple of course. It’s funny
how things can change so quickly.

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mankash666
Cavium is actively competing with Intel, offering ARM for the server space.
You can rent cavium CPUs from [http://Packet.Net](http://Packet.Net) for a lot
cheaper than Intel

Qualcomm's server unit demise has more to do with management than tech -
Cavium built it's processors with fewer dollars than Qualcomm.

------
kev009
More examples of teenage engineering discipline. OpenPOWER is the one you
want.

~~~
patrickg_zill
OpenPOWER will never gain traction outside IBM. They are kept on life support
by Google et al in order to have pricing leverage over Intel. That's it.

~~~
kev009
And ARM in the datacenter has a really stellar trackrecord huh? Everything
changed post meltdown. Gmail is running on OpenPOWER.

~~~
patrickg_zill
They did it to show that they COULD switch away from x64 if needed to. Have
they continued buying OpenPOWER systems at the same rate as they buy x64
hardware?

~~~
kev009
I don't have any FP&A details, only technical public and private. They are
vocal about using it for GPUs. It's a much cheaper and more balanced way to
glue Nvidia GPUs versus Nvidia DGX on x86 which also has severe bottle necks
at the host bridge point. The private is gmail, which happened much later than
the negotiating tactic point. It fits into a number of other goals including a
completely open firmware stack. You only have to have cursory headline
knowledge of the news for the past 2 years to understand why this is no longer
about initial procurement cost.

