Qualcomm wants to buy Intel – Les Numériques
This is the Wall Street Journal reporting to us This Friday, September 20, the news: Qualcomm would like to buy Intel. According to the newspaper's anonymous sources, the agreement would be far from certain. However, if this acquisition were to take place, it would be terrible for Intel, which was once the most valuable company in the electronic chip sector.
THE The New York Times also came to corroborate the information. adding that no offer has been made to Intel by Qualcomm.
A difficult year 2023
As for the context, Intel is currently going through a strong zone of turbulence and this has started, among other things, since its ouster from MacBooks by Apple in 2020. Apple abandoned Santa Clara processors to design its Apple M with the success that we know. Apple has also proven that the ARM architecture has its place in the IT ecosystem while Intel's x86 architecture is still struggling today to move towards sobriety.
Intel's weakness has been particularly palpable in recent months following the announcement of $1.6 billion in losses for 2023, followed by aAnnouncement of layoffs of 15,000 employeesor 15% of its payroll. The other consequence of these poor results, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, now has the firm intention of splitting the manufacturing activity (foundry) from the processor design activity as AMD did in 2009. Intel has also been using TSMC to etch its chips since the arrival of Meteor Lake, a real admission of weakness for the one who was a leader in the field.
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Added to this Desktop CPU instability issues 13th and 14th generation processors pushing the foundry to replace the affected processors and extend their warranty by 2 years and you have a particularly gloomy context for the company which still today has almost 75% market share in consumer computers.
An accumulation of bad choices
For several years Intel has been accumulating strategic setbacks, the company did not believe in the iPhone even though Apple had asked it to design a processor, more recently the company missed the AI turn in favor of Nvidia and in recent days we learned thatIntel missed the tender for the PlayStation 6.
In any case, if this acquisition were to take place, it would be immediately studied by all the competition authorities in the United States, Europe and Asia. Nvidia's acquisition of ARM had thus failed following their interventions.
Intel has a major deadline coming up on September 24 with the launch of Lunar Lake, its new architecture for laptop processors that aims to be 40% more autonomous and whose The first results seem promising.
