AMD offloads mobile tech to Qualcomm

US chip shop Qualcomm said Tuesday that it has acquired certain graphics and multimedia assets from AMD’s handheld business.

The Big Q paid $65m in cash for the business, and will transfer the division’s staff over as part of the deal.

AMD said it offloaded the unit to better concentrate on its core business of chips for the desktop and laptop markets.

The AMD technology looks like it will be folded in with Qualcomm’s mobile multimedia operation, which develops System on a Chip (SoC) technology under the Snapdragon moniker. The deal should also help Qualcomm out of certain licensing fees the company has been paying to AMD for several years.

“This acquisition of assets from AMD’s handheld business brings us strong multimedia technologies, including graphics cores that we have been licensing for several years,” said Steve Mollenkopf, executive vice president of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “Bringing this technology in-house creates even greater synergy as we seamlessly integrate the best-in-class multimedia performance AMD offers into our system-on-chip (SoC) products.”