Can Qualcomm become the NVIDIA of the AI PC race?

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Can Qualcomm become the NVIDIA of the AI PC race?

In the world of AI, and the computing infrastructure that powers AI, there is only one king: Nvidia. The company has skyrocketed to one of the largest in the world on the back of it success leading the transition to an AI computing ecosystem. It has a dominant hold on the chips that power the data centers and servers that enable companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to deliver the AI services that gather the headlines.

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Samsung unpacks the Galaxy S24 with Snapdragon and Exynos silicon

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Samsung unpacks the Galaxy S24 with Snapdragon and Exynos silicon

The heart of this new device is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, first announced at the company’s Snapdragon Summit back in late October. This SoC has 8 CPU cores (one Arm Cortex-X4, five Cortex-A720, two Cortex-A520) that the company claims offers 30% better performance over the previous gen, an updated Adreno GPU that is 25% faster, and maybe you’ve heard of this thing called AI? The integrated Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) is more than 40% faster than last year’s model thanks to hardware and drastic software improvements from the engineering team.

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Microsoft and T-Mobile enable free 5G for the PC

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Microsoft and T-Mobile enable free 5G for the PC

Seeing the news yesterday about T-Mobile offering free 5G connectivity for the Surface Pro 9 with 5G brought back a wave of memories. Back in April 2018 I wrote a paper titled “Defining the Always On, Always Connected PC” that looked at how the Snapdragon 835 (!!) based platforms with their extended battery life and integrated LTE modems changed how users could think about device connectivity. Later that same year I looked at the second generation of Snapdragon devices in another paper, analyzing what had improved and what still needed to get better.

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Apple M3 and M3 Pro Performance Analysis: Should Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm be worried?

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Apple M3 and M3 Pro Performance Analysis: Should Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm be worried?

This launch is made even more interesting due to the pending onslaught of competition coming the PC space from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Only days prior to the Apple announcement, Qualcomm had shown the Snapdragon X Elite SoC that will come in 2024, making some significant claims of performance relative to the best from its rivals. Heading out to my local retailer on Tuesday I picked up a pair of the new MacBook Pro laptops to do some testing and get a feel for how well these new devices compare to other systems powered by Intel and AMD, as well as my own M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro.

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Apple M3 chip announcement leaves doors open for competition

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Apple M3 chip announcement leaves doors open for competition

At the heart of all the new MacBook Pro laptops is a series of M3 processors, for the first time announced and available in the same window. It has been less than a year since Apple launched the M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs, and only four months since we saw the M2 Max released. This is a very fast cadence for a whole new family of processors and probably indicates that sales of that generation weren’t living up to expectations.

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Snapdragon X Elite Rivals Best CPUs in Single Thread Performance

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Snapdragon X Elite Rivals Best CPUs in Single Thread Performance

Last week during its annual Snapdragon Summit held in Maui, Qualcomm dropped a bomb on the computing world with the announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite processor, a new SoC targeted at the notebook PC going squarely after the likes of Intel, Apple, and AMD. You’ll no doubt find a lot of articles posting this morning that summarize a collection of about six different benchmarks that the press was able to witness being run (no true hands on), but I wanted to focus on one particular set of results of interest to me.

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New Qualcomm laptop chips will pressure Intel, AMD in 2024

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New Qualcomm laptop chips will pressure Intel, AMD in 2024

Earlier this week I published a piece here on MarketWatch describing the coming interest and marketing dynamics in the chips landscape centered around the idea of client AI, or AI processing that runs locally on a device like a laptop or a smartphone, rather than in the cloud. Now this week, during the company’s annual technology summit, Qualcomm has taken the wraps off an interesting combination of products paired with some eye-opening claims. These new products have the capability to shift the balance of power in the PC space.

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Intel increases laptop performance to prepare for coming fight with AMD, Qualcomm

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Intel increases laptop performance to prepare for coming fight with AMD, Qualcomm

Intel is taking an aggressive stance with this release, doubling the processor core count from two to four, essentially doubling the amount of computing that each processor will be able to perform in the power restraints of the laptop segment. Because a notebook has to operate with limited power consumption and heat creation to stay inside a standard form factor, balancing performance and power draw is of critical importance. Intel is placing a bet with the 8th Generation Core products that the added processing capability will be used more effectively by software going forward, and that it can offer that capability without sacrificing the vital performance of higher clock rates needed by today’s applications and operating systems.

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Snapdragon Platform Brand Changes Face of Qualcomm Flagship

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Snapdragon Platform Brand Changes Face of Qualcomm Flagship

Though not as exciting as the launch of a new chip or the deployment of a new wireless technology, Qualcomm today takes a big step towards revamping its image and setting the direction for its flagship Snapdragon product line going forward.

The Snapdragon 835 SoC product will now be referred to as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Mobile Platform, removing the moniker of “processor” from the name. All Snapdragon 800-, 600- and 400- chips will follow the same pattern, dropping the term processor and instead adding “mobile platform.”

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The 5G Economy will add $12.3 trillion of revenue by 2035

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The 5G Economy will add $12.3 trillion of revenue by 2035

Earlier today a report commissioned by Qualcomm was released focusing on the impact of upcoming 5G standards and technology on the global economy. (https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/5g/economy) Qualcomm, along with nearly every major player in the technology and wireless industry, believes that 5G will bring about a new era of connected devices with a combined intelligence far greater than what we can demonstrate on today’s offerings. The 5G Economy was led by research firms IHS Markit and PSB, with outside verification by leading economist and professor Dr. David Teece, director of the Tusher Center at the Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley, and principal executive officer of the Berkeley Research Group. The results and tone of the report point towards a substantially more dramatic impact of the move to 5G than we have seen in any previous wireless technology migration.

Many consumers and businesses today not only utilize mobile 4G and 3G technology, but have come to depend on it to drive growth and sustain modern business models. 5G will move mobile wireless connectivity to a new level, hitting the landmark of being considered a General Purpose Technology, a designation given to technologies that change the world. Other GPTs include the printing press, electricity, automobiles, and the internet, putting this new predicted classification into proper context.

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