AMD itself acquired the mobile graphics technology through its purchase of ATI Technologies in 2006. Qualcomm is already licensing the technology for current products, including its Arm-based Snapdragon platform for smartphones and netbooks.

The current licensing arrangement makes Monday's deal a natural step for Qualcomm, said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 in Saratoga, California. With the engineering team on board, Qualcomm knows it can continue to use and develop the graphics capabilities. Plus, the company is likely to continue doing what it naturally does and license the technology to others, Brookwood said. And buying the assets ensured no competitor got them. Qualcomm officials were not immediately available for comment.

"To replicate that kind of R&D or to switch to something else would be hard," Brookwood said. "Qualcomm both has positive gains here and avoids any kind of competitive liabilities." The acquisition will also help Qualcomm compete against the Tegra mobile platform from Nvidia, which combines that company's graphics technology with an Arm core, he said.

"AMD is in trouble," said analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates. "They cannot compete with Intel across the board, and they have to go where they can make some money."

The graphics capabilities Qualcomm has acquired will have a place in both smartphones and MIDs (mobile Internet devices), an emerging product class that will overlap with high-end smartphones but will often be slightly larger, Gold said. Smartphones and MIDs should have multimedia capabilities because they basically have the horsepower of the PCs of four or five years ago, he said.