With its next Snapdragon X75 processor, Qualcomm has set its eyes on supporting challenging AI workloads, despite the difficulties the company has experienced as a result of the dwindling smartphone market.
In a recent announcement, Qualcomm said it was focussing on supporting AI workloads rather than just making chips for communication devices.
Senior VP at Qualcomm, Alex Katouzian stated in a keynote address at Computex exhibition in Taipei on Tuesday that the company is changing to become an intelligent edge computing company.
A lot of computing power is needed for AI workloads. In February this year, Qualcomm unveiled Snapdragon X75, the most recent 5G modem element which it claims would be the first 5G Advanced-capable modem-RF platform in the world.
Additionally, the X75 is said to be 2.5 times quicker at handling AI workloads than the X70. A set of guidelines called 5G-Advanced is intended to increase mobile device flexibility as well as power efficiency while also boosting speed and coverage.
In contrast to cloud-based information centers, local devices provide better performance each watt, according to Katouzian, who noted in his keynote that AI workloads won't be able to be hosted exclusively on the cloud in the future and that the greatest user experience would result from splitting workloads between the cloud and customer devices.
It just won't be practical to transmit everything to the cloud, according to Katouzian, as increase in the quantity of associated devices and data flow increases and the data center expenses rise.
Qualcomm is merely one of numerous firms, like Arm and Nvidia, that has altered its business pattern to capitalize on the expanding demand as the need for chips which can support AI abilities continues to soar.
Although Katouzian claimed at the keynote speech that Qualcomm had sold two billion of those AI-capable products to date, in Qualcomm's second-quarter outcome for the fiscal year 2023, this company's sales from mobile processors, a major industry of it, decrease 17% compared to the previous year.
The results were attributed to by a difficult environment, according to a statement made by Cristiano Amon, CEO at the time, who also claimed that there was no evidence of a rebound in Chinese smartphone sales. The first quarter of 2023 saw a more than 14% fall in shipments of smartphones for the worldwide market, according to IDC.
In spite of the difficult environment, Amon told investors after the firm released its second quarter outcome in 2023 that Qualcomm has been "uniquely positioned" in support for the wide range of AI application cases on the edge devices.
He emphasized that through developing AI, they hope to make fundamental functions like reasoning, perception, action and nowadays content production, ubiquitous on devices. Qualcomm is firmly at the vanguard of this oncoming change with its unmatched AI processing capability per watt in the widest range of categories of devices, including smartphones, PCs, automobiles, and IoT, and millions of AI-powered platform sales each year.