Credit: Qualcomm
Qualcomm has announced that it will shift its focus away from offering chips specifically for communications devices and redouble its efforts to support AI workloads.
Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katoujian said the company is transitioning into an “intelligent edge computing” company during a keynote address at the Computex show in Taipei on Tuesday.
AI workloads require massive amounts of computing power, and in February, Qualcomm unveiled its latest 5G modem component, the Snapdragon X75. This will be the world’s first 5G Advanced capable modem RF system for him, according to the company.
The X75 is also reported to be able to handle AI workloads 2.5x faster than its predecessor, the X70. 5G-Advanced is a set of specifications designed to increase mobile device speed, maximize coverage, improve mobility and power efficiency.
Katojian said in his keynote that local devices have better performance per watt compared to cloud-based data centers, saying that in the future it will become impractical to host AI workloads purely in the cloud, and the most efficient He pointed out that you will have a great experience. Eliminates the need to share workloads between client devices and the cloud.
“As the number of connected devices and data traffic continues to accelerate and data center costs are rising, it is not possible to send everything to the cloud,” Katojian said.
As demand for chips capable of supporting AI capabilities continues to soar, Qualcomm is just one of many companies, including Nvidia and Arm, that have transformed their business models to take advantage of the growing demand.
But while Katoujian said in his keynote that Qualcomm has shipped 2 billion AI-enabled products to date, Qualcomm’s second-quarter financial results for fiscal 2023 show chips for its core business, chips for handsets. said sales had declined. 17% YoY.
In a statement issued at the time, CEO Cristiano Amon attributed the performance to the challenging environment and said he had yet to see evidence of a rebound in smartphone sales in China. Stated. According to IDC, smartphone shipments in the global market fell by more than 14% in the first quarter of 2023.
Despite the tough market, Amon said Qualcomm was “uniquely positioned” to support a wealth of AI use cases on edge devices, speaking with analysts after the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call. said.
“We are evolving AI to make core capabilities ubiquitous on devices such as perception, reasoning, action, and now content creation,” he said. “With millions of AI-enabled platform shipments annually and unmatched AI processing performance per watt across device categories ranging from smartphones to PCs, automobiles and IoT, Qualcomm is firmly at the forefront of the coming transformation. I have.”
Tags Qualcomm
