Qualcomm (QCOM) is ramping up the AI chip competition, announcing two new chips, one for PCs and one for smartphones. Though these are different from the types of chips Nvidia (NVDA) makes, it will put pressure on rivals to deliver their own AI-focused semiconductors. Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley and Allie Garfinkle discuss the state of the AI chip race.
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Video Transcript
JOSH LIPTON: Qualcomm out with a number of key AI announcements, including new chips, as the company faces off against other competitors in this chip race. They're here to discuss Yahoo Finance's Allie Garfinkle and Dan Howley. Allie, let's start with you. What is the latest we got here from Qualcomm?
ALLIE GARFINKLE: Josh, Qualcomm's coming out here swinging, really trying to make the case for itself as an AI play. Now the approach they're taking is what they call on-device AI, AI that is meant to be more efficient on your devices, whether that's your smartphone or your laptop. And there are two new chips to this end that they have announced today. The first one is called the Qualcomm Oryon CPU.
Now, this is a chip specifically for PCs, and it is attached to what they're calling their Snapdragon X Elite compute platform. Now, the most important thing to know about the Oryon is that Qualcomm's making some pretty impressive claims about it-- some pretty hefty claims. What it's saying is that the processing power is faster than a lot of Arm-based competitors-- that's a group that includes Google and TSMC-- and that it hits the peak performance of chips from companies like Intel and Apple.
So that's going to be something that you're-- you should be expecting them to see them really make a case about sooner rather than later, and it's something they're going to be talking about a lot. Now, the other chip they announced is called the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Now, this is a chip for smartphones, and it was built with generative AI in mind. The goal is actually that you can run large language models like ChatGPT or Meta's Llama 2 on your smartphone.
Now, this is specifically for Android smartphones. And it's important to remember here that these chips, while they are AI chips in the sense that they are meant to work with AI, they are not the AI chips that we are talking about from NVIDIA. These are CPUs. NVIDIA's GPUs are what are being used to train AI models. So in the end, don't expect Qualcomm to come in and solve that massive chip shortage that we've all been talking about.
But I will say that the success of these chips, I think, is going to be really key for Qualcomm's case as an AI play moving forward.
JULIE HYMAN: And Dan, let's bring you into this conversation, right? There's a lot going on in the world of semiconductors right now. We have these announcements from Qualcomm, there was a report yesterday that NVIDIA was looking at developing CPUs. Put it all together for us and sort of paint the competitive landscape for us.
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, so the idea here with the NVIDIA CPUs is that these would also be for PCs. They would be for Windows PCs competing alongside of these Qualcomm chips, as well as Intel chips and AMD chips. So really, this is opening up the landscape, I got a caveat that the NVIDIA part with, they didn't want to comment. This was a report from Reuters. But the, you know, landscape now is going to be infinitely more competitive for Intel.
I think it's important to point out that unlike Apple, which has an Arm-based CPU and runs them as the M1, the M2, and the anticipated M3, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, they don't run the software that powers the PCs-- that's Microsoft. Apple has the benefit of running the software, so they have soup-to-nuts control over the system. For NVIDIA and Qualcomm, it's going to be a little bit more difficult to perhaps truly catch up to what Intel and AMD are doing when it comes to overall performance.
Now, the companies in the case of Qualcomm cite overall performance compared to Intel chips, but, you know, it really comes down to when you get them into consumers' hands. Do they match up? And, you know, Qualcomm has been in this space before. They had worked with Microsoft on a Surface device running a Qualcomm chip, so we just need to see if that actually equates to a big amount of power and a big amount of battery life.
That's really the key here, I think, overall is, you know, Apple managed to put out the M1, the M2, the M3. They can last a long time and have plenty of power. Can Qualcomm, can Intel, can AMD, can Nvidia do that with a Windows PC? And that's going to be a big deal if they can.
JULIE HYMAN: And then, can they gather a lot of revenue and market share from it? Eventually, we'll see what happens, you guys. Thank you so much for putting this story in perspective for us, our Allie Garfinkle and Dan Howley. And we're going to continue this conversation, by the way. Be sure to tune in to Yahoo Finance tomorrow. We will be speaking with Qualcomm CEO and President Cristiano Amon. We don't want to miss that conversation.
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October 25, 2023 at 04:07AM
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Qualcomm unveils new PC and smartphone chips focused on AI - Yahoo Finance
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