Yeah no way Intel sells their entire division and definitely not if it includes the actual chip design teams unless Intel's board has lost its mind and basically is going all in on AI and probably also is going to ditch their foundry division (this latter seems plausible, but then their chip design teams arguably become more important). I'd guess this pertains to product development (the teams that make the reference designs and does chipsets/motherboard and other for OEMs; its why I think they should have gone for the NUC division as it would play to their strengths and really set them up as the Windows version of what Apple has done), but most likely Qualcomm wants a way to quickly figure out the business contracts that has kept Intel operating as normal even when AMD has had clear advantages. If I were Intel's board I'd see if they could trade Gelsinger (who's business acumen should fit right in with Qualcomm since a large part of boths' successes are built on anti-competitive behavior) for access to their cellular modems. Heck, throw in Raja while they're at it since rumors are Qualcomm is considering dGPU.
Would that maybe contain the division that would be analogous to AMD's console/embedded/semi-custom? Maybe Qualcomm would want that type of client design chops, and it doesn't seem to be doing much for Intel, so might be likely to part with it, viewing it as getting rid of unsuccessful group plus it would theoretically cause more competition to AMD which should benefit Intel. I have to imagine anyone considering making a console is strongly looking at ARM, and AMD so far has done a poor job of offering anything compelling there (their lone one being lackluster Samsung chips).
It's not clearly defined in the article, but based on Intel's own financial filings, that would be all the desktop and mobile CPU design teams, and presumably all the support teams that handle related software (stuff like XTU, some drivers/scheduler stuff)
They could certainly use help in the driver side, but since its more the GPU drivers, not sure getting Intel's would be that beneficial to them. And not sure Intel would want to get rid of them since they're needed to keep developing their GPU, unless they ditch dGPU again, but even then the one part of that team I'd think Intel would want to keep would be the software/drivers (since it'll be needed for iGPU). And they seem to have done a commendable job of improving Arc.
Frankly though, this could be Qualcomm sowing some extra doubt for Intel's investors. Spread some uncertainty by making it seem like Intel has been shopping key parts of its business. The timing especially feels like this might be part of the play, as it happens right after the like lone positive news Intel has had for some time, that Lunar Lake (?) is actually good, offering AMD iGPU rivaling graphics, with ARM level efficiency. I don't doubt Qualcomm wants to buy parts of Intel's business, but not much of it makes sense I think.