To be fair, that is the response to all 'Why is X acquiring Y?' questions, and it's a terrible answer.

M&A is hard to do right -- most fail, and a staggering percent have all the surplus delivered to the seller instead of the buyer. See: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor...

The real answer would speak to why (Intel thinks) this deal is not like the average, unsuccessful deal, and specifically why they would be able to use Broadcom's assets better than Qualcomm.

The answers here probably have something to do with datacenters and energy/heat efficiency gains when you stop being fabless, something to do with anti-trust avoidance (qualcomm is limited by anti-trust concerns much more than Intel is, without those limits the value goes up), and something to do with cost and workflow concerns. Intel has a substantial risk to their current model, which is already hitting something of a natural ceiling of cost per manufacturing facility, driven largely by precision requirements -- that ceiling is what stopped Moore's law, I think, because no one can build a facility that costs even more money than Intel -- and developing business processes that can deliver classic Intel improvements in a more fabless or fabless-friendly process could reduce that risk.

This is all pure guesswork, but I think it gets closer to the actual discussions inside the companies.

It was just a joke, based on the usual wooden speak of these announcements.

I don't know which acquisition is better. I do think that Intel should probably enter the ARM, somehow, just to hedge their bets.

Again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale)? They gave up on that to focus on low power x86 CPUs.

Intel has an architectural license for 32-bit ARM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Arm_architectural...), so they could design their own micro-architecture whenever they want to. I don’t know whether they have one for 64-bit ARM, but they have money, so I expect it wouldn’t be difficult to get one.

I didn't mean that they should necessarily build something. But at least buying stock from an ARM manufacturer might not be a bad idea. Maybe not taking them over, but at least having stock.

That way, if things go wrong with x86, they can at least pull a Yahoo - Alibaba.

Actually about 70% of corporate acquisitions more or less achieve their goals. As for the other 30% it often is a disaster.

I had a citation for only 22% of mergers meeting their revenue goals. If you have someone more likely to have quality guesses than McKinsey, then please share yours.