[amluto]

This all sounds so inept on Qualcomm’s part that I have trouble believing the explanation.

Qualcomm is trying to make money on the whole shebang, not on the PMICs. They’re trying to sell, for lack of a better word, a system on multiple chips. Intel and AMD do this too (see their chipsets, for example). When someone makes a laptop, the the CPU vendor accounts for some of the BOM cost, and that’s their revenue. The manufacturer is willing to pay some total BOM cost at a given performance point, and they’ll buy more units at a lower total. So the CPU vendor wants the total to be as low as possible and their portion of it to be as high as possible. Except to the extent that supplying PMICs (if done competently) diverts more of the BOM to them without increasing the total, they don’t really care whose PMICs are used in the grand scheme of things. And they certainly wouldn’t torpedo the entire product launch over PMICs.

I bet this is actually just overconfidence in their product. They designed around their proprietary PMIC, and that design is important: a CPU draws variable amounts of power, and the system will not work if the power and voltages are wrong. For bonus points, the CPU would much rather operate at lower power (skip clocks or whatever) than simply crash if an intensive workload starts and the battery plus whatever power supply is connected can’t keep up. [0]. So I bet they tried to get all this right, they designed around their PMICs, they didn’t realize the chip format was inappropriate, and they can’t fix it in time for market. Oops.

Qualcomm has never done the laptop thing for real before. Intel, AMD, and Apple have.

[0] Anyone remember Apple’s issues here?

[throwaway57546]

I distinctly recall my disappointment when I heard it was Qualcomm that acquired Nuvia because I knew they'd find a way to f*ck it up. This is unfortunately incredibly on brand for Qualcomm. They do the same bundling with the 5G Radios and Snapdragon SoC's. They're more of a patent law firm than a tech company.

[amluto]

I was mostly disappointed because I hoped that Nuvia would result in a product that was fairly open from the perspective of users. You can buy an Intel or AMD CPU, pair it with pretty much anything, and do whatever you want with it. You need to deal with awkward firmware messes and a frequently messy security ecosystem, but it mostly just works. You don’t need software blobs from Intel or (ignoring sometimes messy graphics) AMD.

Even Apple is fairly good in this regard.

Qualcomm, OTOH, does not have a good track record in this regard.

[ksec]

Remember , and for those who don't know. This is semiaccurate, known for hyperbole. I can't remember a single thing they got right.