With a newly completed acquisition and ongoing developments in the metaverse, there is a lot for Qualcomm (QCOM 1.24%) management to be excited about these days. In this segment from "Semiconductor Revolution," recorded on Feb. 3, Motley Fool contributors Nicholas Rossolillo and Jose Najarro discuss what's new at Qualcomm.
Nick Rossolillo: He answered about three of the technologies that he is most excited about in the coming years. Qualcomm acquired this company called NUVIA almost a year ago now. It's a start-up. They design chips based on ARM architecture. That's the company that Nvidia was trying to acquire. NUVIA designs these chips based on the ARM architecture, and probably this will ramp up next year. Qualcomm is trying to release CPUs based on NUVIA'S designs to enter the PC market. Kind of what Apple did with their new MacBooks, where they converged the same CPU that's used in the iPhone. It's now basically a bigger version of that and in their laptops and tablets, huge performance boost.
This actually could be a really big long-term risk for AMD, who we were just talking about. I think that's a bigger risk to AMD than Intel is. Then of course, Intel. I think everybody is like gunning for Intel these days. That's something really interesting to watch. Qualcomm sees big potential for their chips in the PC market. They also acquired a small software company called Arriver just recently, they acquired it from an auto supplier called Veoneer. I wrote about that a few months ago on the details of that. Then most exciting Akash said, the metaverse. Anyone here has put on a quest two headset. Does anyone regularly visit the metaverse here?
Jose Najarro: I haven't used that one. I've used up PlayStation 4 headset, which was released four or five years ago. I think that was the last time I pull a virtual headset, and that technology alone I thought was insane. I do believe Qualcomm actually does make chips for Sony's headset as well.
Nick Rossolillo: They sure do. The Oculus Quest 2 is the leader. I've seen estimates that something like maybe three-quarters of all VR headsets are Meta's, Facebook's Oculus business. This was back in November, but they said they had shipped 10 million to-date. Obviously, we just went through the holiday shopping season and I know like a ton [laughs] of my friends went and got one of these things so who knows what that number is now? But mobile is still growing. Qualcomm has a lot of growth potential ahead of it.
