Enabling on-device gen AI applications across its portfolio is a clear priority for Qualcomm
Following a strong set of gen AI announcements at its Snapdragon Summit last week, Qualcomm reported earnings on Nov. 1, and the story may be coalescing for investors as the company’s stock jumped more than 5% this morning. With the exception of it’s booming automotive business, Qualcomm reported year-over-year revenue decreases across its handset and internet of things segments.
CEO Cristiano Among set the stage on the Q4 2023 call: “We have quickly established Qualcomm as a leader in on-device gen AI for smartphones, next-generation laptops, XR and automotive, and we are well positioned to benefit from this opportunity. We expect high-performance on-device AI to become a requirement over the next few years, driving content, units or both.”
Specific to the PC market, the headline from Snapdragon Summit was the Snapdragon X Elite mobile computing platform anchored by its custom Oryon CPU which the company signaled it will scale across its product lines in the coming year. This is all part of Qualcomm’s gradual transition toward connected processing anchored around the premise that all devices will be cloud connected requiring high performance, low power compute that’s optimized for running gen AI workloads on device when possible and in concert with distributed cloud resources when necessary.
“As always running on-device Gen AI becomes pervasive, we believe it will create one of the most significant changes in user experience similar to the transition from the feature phone to the smartphone and the introduction of the graphical user interface for PCs,” Amon said. “Snapdragon will play a significant role in this transformation. We also reached an important milestone in our expansion into PCs with the announcement of our Snapdragon X Elite platform. It is the result of a relentless pursuit to create the ultimate intelligent computing experience and established Snapdragon as the industry leader in performance and power efficiency.”
Specific to PCs, Qualcomm has been iterating on its mobile, connected computing platform for several generations, but the introduction of a custom CPU with Oryon is an inflection point. In response to a question on the call, Amon highlighted the company’s compute and gen AI capabilities, but also called out the Windows on Arm ecosystem, the company’s long-term relationship with Microsoft and the ISV inroads that come with that.
“Microsoft has been very active together with us of bringing a lot of applications natively to the platform,” he said. “You continue to see announcements in Windows 11 can also run every x86, 32 and 64 bit through the Microsoft emulation. We also made significant strides in the emulation performance. So I think Snapdragon X Elite represents the results of this Microsoft-Qualcomm collaboration, and I’ll finish the answer by saying, if you look at the announcements of other computing companies talking about having an Arm-based PC processor, that is validation that that’s our TAM now. It is going to be part of the expansion of TAM for Qualcomm. We’re a new player, and we look at this as a growth opportunity. We’re excited about it.”
