Qualcomm reportedly aims to cash in on Intel's financial woes by stripping the ailing chipmaker of parts.

Qualcomm is said to be interested in Intel's client PC design business, according to unnamed sources cited in a Reuters report on Friday.

The mobile chip designer is also rumored to be exploring other aspects of the business, but the server segment probably won't be one of them, one source told Reuters.

With the launch of its X Elite notebook chips this spring, Qualcomm - a semiconductor goliath best known for designing Arm-based mobile chips used in smartphones and tablets - has become a direct competitor to x86-slinger Intel.

It's not hard to see why Intel's PC design business - which likely refers to a segment responsible for developing reference designs in collaboration with OEMs and not the chips themselves - could prove to be a valuable asset for Qualcomm as it looks to expand into the PC segment.

Again, Qualcomm is all about Arm compatibility and to a degree RISC-V, so whatever part of Intel it may be interested in, we can't imagine it will be directly x86 cores.

There is some precedent for this. Last year, Intel shuttered its division responsible for designing and planning out server grade systems and sold off the blueprints to system builder MiTAC. However, considering that Intel's Client Computing Group was responsible for more than half of its product division revenues last quarter and is one of the few segments seeing year-over-year growth, a sale of even a small portion of that business strikes us as unlikely.

An Intel spokesperson declined to comment on speculation. We also reached out to Qualcomm, which has so far declined to comment. In a statement to the newswire earlier Intel said it's "deeply committed to our PC business," and noted it hadn't even heard from Qualcomm on this matter.

According to a separate report by Bloomberg earlier this week, Intel's financial trouble could drive it to divest from its Mobileye autonomous driving unit. The x86 giant currently holds an 88 percent stake in the business which it took public in late 2022.

The report also claimed that Intel was also exploring its options for its Network and Edge Group (NEX), which, as its name suggests, designs and manufactures chips used in a variety of network devices including NICs and other telecommunications kits.

These reports come as Intel looks to shed more than 15 percent of its global workforce - roughly 16,000 employees by our estimates - following its disastrous Q2 earnings call in August. Combined with major cuts to capex spending, Intel hopes these cutbacks will save it in excess of $10 billion in 2025.

CEO Pat Gelsinger is said to be weighing even more drastic measures to keep the company afloat, including selling off or spinning out business units like its FPGA biz Altera and even its floundering foundry division.

The chief exec will reportedly present these remedies to Intel's board later this month, but it seems that the vultures are already circling overhead. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/06/qualcomm_intel_rumors/