At last week's Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm released the new generation Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform and two brand new in car platforms.
After the annual event, Meng Pu, Chairman of Qualcomm China, was interviewed by several media outlets, including Interface News. In an interview, Meng Pu stated that this is the first official automotive product launch day held at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in 9 years.
After this release, Qualcomm has now completed the unified deployment of its self-developed chips in the three major smart terminals of PCs, smartphones, and automobiles, which is also a layout that other chip giants have not yet completed.
For this wave of AI, Qualcomm was clearly prepared earlier and has shown a posture of fully attacking in various fields. While stabilizing the mobile phone business, the PC and automotive businesses also provide more room for imagination for Qualcomm's future growth.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Qualcomm's entry into the Chinese market. Currently, Qualcomm is the largest multinational technology company in the world with the highest market share in China, with over 50% of its business coming from China.
Meng Pu told Interface News that Qualcomm's style is different from many multinational companies, and it has long-term cooperation with Chinese industries. Moreover, the China region is a complete business entity responsible for local market business and reports directly to the CEO.
Based on this long-term customer and resource accumulation, he believes that with the development of generative AI technology, Qualcomm's opportunities in China will also increase.
Qualcomm will not define AI phones
Since last year, an increasing number of PC and mobile phone manufacturers have been discussing the concept of AI PCs and AI phones, hoping to seize the wave of AI technology.
In the market situation of "mixed fish and dragons", Microsoft has its own set of definition standards for AI PC products, and only products with NPU computing power reaching 45TOPS can reach the threshold of Copilot+PC.
Meng Yong told Interface News that Qualcomm will not propose a standard for AI phones. He acknowledged that generative AI is still a very emerging technology and not all SoCs can support it. Users may need to manually distinguish whether a phone is an AI phone.
As for the Snapdragon 8 Elite platform released this time alone, it has already cooperated with domestic companies such as Zhipu and Tencent in the field of AI.
But he believes that AI is a continuous evolution process, and now some manufacturers may use end-to-end AI, while others choose cloud based AI. These are just the current route selection issues, and ultimately all phones will become AI phones.
Today we talked more about flagship chips and flagship phones, and what kind of end-to-end models they support, "Meng Hao said. In the future, the threshold for AI phones will gradually decrease, and end-to-end AI will also be installed on mid-range and even low-end smartphones.
The self-developed route will continue to follow
With the increasing demand for intelligence among car manufacturers, they increasingly hope that car chips will be different from mobile phone chips from the beginning. The two Snapdragon platforms released by Qualcomm this time have many differences in details from mobile SoCs, but they share similarities in core architecture.
After the launch of the two in car platforms with built-in Oryon, Qualcomm has officially completed the final piece of its self-developed SoC product line, laying out its layout on the three major smart terminals of mobile phones, PCs, and automobiles.
This is also the second time in Qualcomm's history that it has implemented a self-developed strategy.
Previously, Qualcomm had attempted to develop self-developed chips based on the ARM architecture, but the product at that time did not show significant improvement compared to ARM public version products. However, the investment was high, so Qualcomm ultimately abandoned self-developed chips and continued to use ARM public version.
And this time, Qualcomm's self-developed Oryon has received praise from the market, with the biggest contributors behind the scenes undoubtedly being former Apple Chief Chip Architect Gerard Williams and Nuvia, which it co founded.
The company was founded by three former Apple executives and was acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021. It is currently the team responsible for the self-developed Oryon chip.
Self developed chips can help Qualcomm break free from its dependence on ARM design and gain more autonomy in the increasingly fierce chip market competition.
We can achieve better performance through our own research, and I think Qualcomm will continue to follow this path
End side AI is very important for PC
The biggest winner in the PC market this year is undoubtedly Qualcomm.
All mainstream PC manufacturers worldwide have launched AI PC related products based on Qualcomm processors, bringing the "Windows On ARM" camp back into the competitive arena.
The PC market has always been a concept of the "Win tel" alliance for so many years, but Microsoft's release of Copilot+PC is the first time that a new Windows product has chosen Intel chips, and it is entirely based on Qualcomm chips, which is a representative event
But it cannot be denied that the X86 platform has a long-term advantage in the software ecosystem, and the ARM camp still has a lot of work to do. We are working with Microsoft to support ecosystem building and make many software native to ARM, including software translation and Chinese culture, which are all things that Qualcomm China needs to do.
Long term customization with customers
In recent years, Chinese mobile phone manufacturers have been transforming into high-end products, investing a lot of research and development funds and market promotion in foldable screens and camera modules. The competitive dimension of smartphones seems to be becoming increasingly narrow.
The emergence of AI has changed this competitive situation, bringing more dimensions of competition to mobile phone manufacturers. At present, major mobile phone manufacturers have launched many terminal side AI functions, such as AI photo editing, photo generation, real-time translation, and writing assistants. Some of these applications are self-developed by manufacturers, while others are contributed by third-party developers.
Meng Hao told Interface News that Qualcomm's original intention for launching AI Hub was to enable developers to develop different AI applications based on terminals supported by different models of Snapdragon chips.
He revealed that when mobile phone manufacturers released their first batch of flagship products, many of the work was started 6 or even 12 months in advance, and Qualcomm would also accompany the engineers of these customers for optimization and adaptation work.
This process can be seen as a customization process, "Meng Hao said. Each manufacturer uses a different large model, and customers have their own preferred partners, so this customization process is essential, similar to building software ecosystems for different processor platforms.
AI Hub provides developers with rich AI models for the Snapdragon platform in this process, and Qualcomm is closely tracking various new models and optimizing them. "Last year's 7B model was already the smallest scale, and this year we can even see models with 1B and 3B parameters.
Qualcomm has advantages in the automotive business
Meng believes that Qualcomm's entry into the automotive market has its own advantages compared to its competitors.
Qualcomm started out in the mobile phone business and entered the Chinese market very early. At that time, there were hundreds of mobile phone companies in the market, and Qualcomm needed to support them by considering how to adapt to the needs of different manufacturers in the product design stage.
During this process, Qualcomm has accumulated support capabilities to meet a large number of customer demands and is prepared to face the development wave of intelligent vehicles in China. We have many customers with 50% of our business in overseas markets, and we also hope to promote Chinese car manufacturers to bring their products to the global market
Meanwhile, several years ago, Qualcomm was laying out plans for the growth of new businesses, including personnel and resource reserves.
Meng Hao said that during the epidemic, Qualcomm was one of the few foreign companies to maintain double-digit personnel growth. "We cannot wait until the domestic market (automotive) business demand arises, we are preparing
Over the past three years, Qualcomm has supported more than 50 Chinese car brands to release over 160 models, and in the short term, has supported a large number of customers to release products, which is a test for any chip platform.