Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
On Friday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported Intel had been approached by fellow chip giant Qualcomm about a possible takeover. While any deal is described as “far from certain,” according to the paper’s unnamed sources, it would represent a tremendous fall for a company that had been the most valuable chip company in the world, based largely on its x86 processor technology that for years had triumphed over Qualcomm’s Arm chips outside of the phone space.
It would also be a massive coup for Qualcomm, which reentered the desktop processor market this year as a part of Microsoft’s AI PC strategy after years of dominance in mobile processors.
Intel, meanwhile, is arguably in its weakest position in years — while many of its…