Qualcomm takes the wheel 🚘 Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are in Maui for this episode of the Six Five Media On The Road, where they’re joined by Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s Group General Manager, Automotive, Industrial and Cloud, Qualcomm for a conversation on the innovative developments revealed at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit.
Get all the details on:
- Key announcements about the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite
- Nakul’s insights into the future of AI in the automotive technology
- Qualcomm’s diversification beyond handsets into areas like automotive, IoT, and PCs
- How Qualcomm has gone from being an ADAS newcomer to a major force in just a few years with a $45 billion design win pipeline
- Qualcomm’s focus on safety and passenger vehicles in their newest automotive SOCs and their approach working with automakers
- A look ahead: What’s next for Qualcomm and Snapdragon
Learn more at Qualcomm.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here at Snapdragon Summit 2024 in beautiful Maui. Daniel, it’s great to be back. I mean, we’ve seen innovation in mobility. We’ve seen innovation in automotive. We got a little bit more information about the PC market. It’s been pretty exciting, and a big AI wrapper across all of them.
Daniel Newman: And this event has evolved so much while the location has stayed the same, a destination I think anybody would be happy to come to. It’s been really great to watch the company evolve. You and I have talked over the last several years about the company’s diversification strategy, how it used to report and how it is reporting now. It’s entering new markets, but more importantly, it’s not just entering markets for sort of the PR value, it’s entering markets and winning. And I think that’s been a big theme here is not just what are we doing, it’s what is Qualcomm doing? How is it being successful? How is it being measured? And the thing is, Pat, it’s executing on that diversification strategy.
Patrick Moorhead: It is, and particularly with automotive, that wasn’t even discussed five years ago. And I remember being at CES and they said, “Hey, we’re going to take a ride. We have ADAS.” And I said, “Wait, you guys are doing ADAS, really? I had no idea.” And now from a backlog perspective, it’s a juggernaut. The last three or four quarters, it’s come up as earnings is the biggest, biggest growth segment out there. So with that said, let’s bring the star of the show here, the leader of automotive and more. Nakul, welcome back to The Six Five.
Nakul Duggal: Good afternoon.
Daniel Newman: A regular here on the show. It’s been great to watch the evolution. I think you heard Pat and I talking about that in the buildup. I mean, just a couple years ago it was handset, handset, handset, maybe some IP and licensing. And there was a promise made really when Cristiano took the helm that the company was going to diversify. It’s gotten into IOT, it’s gotten into PCs, it’s been able to… it really dominated that RF part of the business. And then of course automotive. And it’s been an incredible run. But talk a little bit about that every year when we catch up, how’s that going? How’s it evolving? How are your customers feeling? How are you feeling about the business?
Nakul Duggal: I feel like we are the adult in the room, in the automotive business because we’ve been doing this for a long time now. I mean, I know everybody in the industry, we are all living through the same complexity, the same challenges, the same competition. And it feels good because technology complexity and automotive is quite a difficult thing. Automakers have traditionally been optimized for many different things, manufacturing, scale, global footprint. But as you start to bring electrification, as you start to bring software, as you start to bring driver assistance, the skill set development that is needed is a pretty complicated thing. And what we’ve been able to do over the last five years or so is actually think about how do we become more relevant to our customers beyond the things that they expect of us anyway? That’s the journey that we’ve been on, and I think we just basically do what we say we would. And I think customers have shown that they trust us and I think the results speak for themselves.
Patrick Moorhead: Not only do I remember that first CES, ADAS ride with the compute in the trunk, but also a conversation we had when you had first started the business. Now you were operating in stealth for a while, but this was the first time you had come out. And I remember you talking to me about the strategy of really meeting customers where they are. Some want an integrated package, some want piece parts and put them together themselves. Others want parts of the solution, which is a combination of the software and the hardware and even the services that come together. But it’s really cool to have you at the FENT. I was always asking, “Why isn’t there automotive at Snapdragon Summit, right?” And this year was the first time that you came there. I think that’s a really good for the company to do that. You made some major announcements today, two major product announcements. You had a customer, a design win on stage, a lot of stuff going on. Can you tell us about the announcements?
Nakul Duggal: So we announced the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and the Ride Elite. This is our fifth generation SOC in eight and a half years. So you can imagine from the time that we started to get into the compute business to where we are at, this is a juggernaut. This is a beast in terms of… So when we talk about central compute, this defines what central compute is going to mean for the car. Now, think about where we are coming from. We are deployed across every automaker in terms of driving some form of ADAS, a lot of cockpit for pretty much every automaker. We are in the second generation, maybe the third generation design cycle with most of these automakers.
So we have a pretty good idea as to what it is that we are going to have to incrementally change and what’s going to have to change. That’s going to be far in excess of what anybody had imagined. Those were the inputs that we took. We’ve had a lot of customers provide us input into what they want to see designed. And I’m super excited about what we can do with this product because already I can tell you from the time that we lock specs down to the types of questions that people are asking, I know that we are going to have to start to think about architectures. How can you double this up? Where is AI headed? One principle that we adopted a few years ago, which was a very important decision that we made, was we will only design chips with full safety. We are not going to design anything that appears like, “Oh, this is a smartphone-”
Patrick Moorhead: That means like ASLD.
Nakul Duggal: ASLD at IP block level. So there are various types of ways that you can do safety. We design every single… so if you take our NPU, it’s designed to be safe. So if you have to certify the software that’s running on the NPU for ADAS, it has to go through safety certification and that level of rigor is going to be needed if you have to do these things at scale. There are no shortcuts really. So operating at that scale, I mean, there are many different ways to enter into these markets, but we’ve taken an approach. We are sticking with it. Customers appreciate the directness and the strategy. And I think you heard from some of them today.
Daniel Newman: We talked to Cristiano too, and he was talking about how this is a future-proofing effort too. And some of what you’ve been able to accomplish at Qualcomm has been pretty remarkable in terms of, first of all, just the continuity that’s being created across platforms, starting to see that there’s some unity. It’s not like a car business and a PC business and a phone business. You’re seeing this SOC really start to mature where obviously you customize for the use, but also there’s a lot of IP that’s really usable and reusable and scalable. And that’s really exciting because you have to be constantly upgrading. You have to deal with the fact that innovation is going fast. You’re hearing about robo-taxis, you’re hearing about completely full self-driving.
And then you said earlier, I like your quote, “We’re the adults in the room for automotive.” So part of it is like, “The future is you’re not going to have a steering wheel. You’re not going to have pedals. You’re just going to get in the car and you’re going to…” Well, you read the newspaper of course on your device. I’m joking. But you’ve got this rapid evolution that’s going on. I mean, talk about where you’re headed with that, because are we going to this robo-taxi era? I mean, the events just happen. Are we going to driverless and what do your OEMs think about this? And all your partners as well?
Nakul Duggal: Let’s talk business first, right? There are 90 million cars produced every year. That’s the business. So we spend a lot of time focusing on the cars that are produced, that are purchased by people like you and me. And that’s where the content is. That’s where the experiences are. That’s where the safety is. And most of those cars are trying to get to the next rung of experience, differentiation. So when you think of something like what we’ve announced, it’s to be able to think about in the next five years, what are the likely differentiators that customers are going to be focused on, and how do we make sure that we position ourselves very well for them, for ourselves? And if you understand how to go do that, then you’re just planning for what is to come over the next three to five years.
And as you saw today, we have customers from all over the world. We had Li Auto, we had Grateful Motors, we had Mercedes, we had Rivian. And it was to give you a bit of a sense as to how broad and really uncorrelated the user feedback is that we receive. And uncorrelated is very important because you want to make sure that you are able to not think for your customers what they would like to go do. The other piece that I really appreciate about a lot of these customers is that they are also building roadmaps of experiences for their customers. Their platforms are also improving. They’re also thinking about what more can they put in. To your comment about robo-taxis and just ADAS in general. Now, the bet that we’ve made is we are going to focus our stack efforts on the passenger vehicle segment. And the SOC efforts are obviously broad-based. These SOCs, the Snapdragon Ride Elite can be used for L4, L5, you can get a constellation of them together. But our stack efforts are very focused on passenger vehicles. So I think robo-taxis-
Daniel Newman: It’s coming, but you’re building for the business and revenue that you’re promising the market?
Nakul Duggal: Yeah. I mean, in this market, you have to be super focused on what it is that you’re going to get up in the morning and do because these products have to be launched. These programs are all very critical. It’s a complicated business. And if there are new things that we can do, they have to be sitting on a foundation, first of all, the silicon and the architecture of the silicon. That allows us to have a conversation with the customer that says, I would like to build a robo-taxi stack on this. Can you support me? And now with these platforms, the answer is yes. Where that market goes, I think that market is going to keep evolving and become… I think it’s going to get segmented into the types of environments where you can apply a robot to transport humans. And some are fairly benign, fairly straightforward environments.
You can take college campuses, you can take adult living facilities, and then you can take downtown San Francisco and New York, and you kind of have to find the set point for where is the economics going to start to make sense? How much do you have to do to maintain the software? What are the savings that are being accrued by customers? So we have a fairly straightforward position on these types of things. Certain things we observe very closely to understand what role we can play. Certain things we will bet on ourselves. I think in robo-taxis we are focused on being the silicon supplier.
Patrick Moorhead: So it looks like you’re addressing the meat of the market cars that people actually buy, but with an architecture that can scale to the future.
Nakul Duggal: Exactly.
Patrick Moorhead: Regardless of the L that you want that.
Daniel Newman: L6.
Patrick Moorhead: Sure. If you can make that one up. There we go.
Daniel Newman: My phone’s on 7G.
Patrick Moorhead: You heard it here on Six Five. Hey, this great conversation. Really incredible announcements today. Let’s talk a little bit about the future, not asking you to disclose a roadmap. I mean you just brought out- But what’s the focus going to be for the next year for you? What things are you looking at?
Nakul Duggal: Well, I think AI is certainly top of mind because… and I’ll give you some examples. I think the car is one of these platforms where there is a tremendous amount of intelligence that exists inside the vehicle, but the way that software is architected and subsystems are architected, the information is not something that you can capture to create intelligence that you can learn from, that you can share, that you can deploy, that you can develop your new roadmaps off of. And that’s something that we’re going to be spending a lot of time on. Already, the questions that we are getting from a number of customers tell us that you have to be able to really correlate different types of data points in the car, that when you assemble together, create very valuable information.
And especially when the industry is going through so much change, new product introductions, EVs, getting into new markets. If you don’t have that real-time feedback, it is very easy to actually not be able to get your roadmap, your investment’s going to be wasted. So we are spending a lot of time both in terms of how to apply AI to the workflow in the cloud, how to connect that to what is happening at the edge, and then build information from that together.
Patrick Moorhead: So it’s data inputs, what you do with the data, there’s a lot of data management. It evolved. And then how you activate the data, regardless, it’s hybrid except in the cloud or the car.
Daniel Newman: And of course, with so many design wins, right? Make sure that these customers that you brought over the line feel great about their designs. This is a multi-year process. And then the first win leads to the second win, and then it’s getting the whole map. All the designs, all the models, and then eventually, I mean, if you have anything to do with it’s going to be owning. They own a hundred percent of the market. I’m sure you’d like that or close to that. I’m sure you’d like to try. But the run-up in seriousness, Nikul, has been impressive. The ability to gain, I still remember it was 10 billion.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right. I wrote an article about that when it was 10. I kept ratcheting it up.
Daniel Newman: So congratulations. I know. By the way, automotive’s not the only thing you’ve got cooking, but here at Snapdragon Summit, it was the biggest thing. Lots going on. We’ll have to have you back on the show.
Nakul Duggal: Thank you so much.
Daniel Newman: Cool. Thanks for joining us.
Nakul Duggal: Great to see you both.
Patrick Moorhead: You too. Thank you.
Daniel Newman: And thank you very much for being part of The Six Five. We’re here in beautiful Maui. This is The Six Five. We are On the Road. Hit subscribe. Join us for all of our content here on this site. But for Patrick and myself, it’s time to say goodbye for now. We’ll see you all really soon.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
