Qualcomm doubles down on its pivot to AI all through Computex keynote

Qualcomm has declared it is shifting its target from delivering chips solely for communications equipment and doubling down on its efforts to help AI workloads.

The organization is transitioning to getting to be  an “intelligent edge computing” agency, Alex Katouzian, a senior vice president at Qualcomm, mentioned in the course of a keynote speech at the Computex exhibit in Taipei Tuesday.

AI workloads need a good deal of compute power and in February, Qualcomm declared the Snapdragon X75, its latest 5G modem element that the business reported will be the world’s initially modem-RF method for 5G-Innovative — a established of requirements developed to make improvements to speed, optimize protection, and enhance mobility and power effectiveness for mobile equipment. The X75 is also reportedly able to procedure AI workloads 2.5 times more rapidly than its predecessor, the X70.

Local products offer excellent efficiency for each watt, in comparison to cloud-primarily based facts centers, Katouzian said in the course of his keynote, noting that going forward, it will not be possible for AI workloads to be hosted purely in the cloud and the most productive knowledge would arrive from sharing workloads in between shopper units and the cloud.

“As advancement in the number of connected gadgets and facts site visitors continues to accelerate and data centre charges climb, it merely will not be doable to ship anything to the cloud,” Katouzian claimed.

As the need for chips that can guidance AI abilities carries on to skyrocket, Qualcomm is just a single of many firms, such as Nvidia and Arm, that has pivoted its business enterprise product to just take advantage of the rising demand.

Nevertheless, although Katouzian said throughout the keynote that, to day, Qualcomm has transported two billion AI-capable products and solutions, in Qualcomm’s next-quarter earnings for monetary yr 2023, the corporation saw gross sales from handset chips, a main company for the corporation, drop 17% calendar year on yr.

In a statement issued at the time, CEO Cristiano Amon blamed the effects on a challenging natural environment, and said the corporation experienced not noticed proof that smartphone product sales are recovering in China. In accordance to IDC, smartphone shipments for the world-wide sector declined in excess of 14% in the initial quarter of 2023.

Despite the challenging industry, speaking to analysts after the firm described its 2023 2nd quarter effects, Amon claimed that Qualcomm is “uniquely positioned” to aid the abundance of AI use scenarios on edge gadgets.

“We’re advancing AI to make core on-machine capabilities ubiquitous such as notion, reasoning, action, and now, content material development,” he said. “With tens of millions of AI-enabled platform shipments per yr, unparalleled AI processing performance for each watt in the broadest range of gadget categories from smartphones to PCs, automotive, and IoT, Qualcomm is firmly at the forefront of this future transformation.”