Broadcom Bids To Snatch Qualcomm For $103 Billion

Following reports the past few days of Broadcom and Qualcomm potentially hooking up, Broadcom just filed their offer today to try to buy up Qualcomm for $103 billion USD.

Broadcom is trying to buy Qualcomm for $103 billion in cash and stock. After the rumors recently about such a deal, Reuters is now reporting on today's offer.

This could be an interesting deal and would exert more force against Intel. From a Linux perspective, it would be interesting to see how it plays out. In the Linux community there are commonly complaints against both Broadcom and Qualcomm from a driver / open-source contribution perspective, but has been improving in recent years. The Qualcomm QuiC innovation center has been providing many open-source contributions, QuiC has even been contributing to the Freedreno driver stack, and the Qualcomm mainline kernel support is getting better over time.

Some Linux users remain concerned about Broadcom WiFi drivers and the like, but they too are slowly getting better. Broadcom since its hire of Eric Anholt has also been improving their open-source graphics driver support with all the work done on the VC4 stack and now on the bring-up of the next-gen VC5 hardware.

It will be interesting to see how a Broadcom + Qualcomm hook-up plays out, assuming this deal goes through.