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Qualcomm 8-Core Copilot+ Chip Announcement

Qualcomm 8-Core Copilot+ Chip Announcement

The Six Five team discusses Qualcomm 8-Core Copilot+ Chip Announcement

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Transcript:

Daniel Newman: Let’s talk about Qualcomm. They have a eight core part. They’re coming down market while we’re talking ultra premium and top of the market. Qualcomm’s like, “Look, we’re going to attack the whole market. We’re going to come out with an eight core part. We’re going to put in the $700.” What do you think, Pat? What’s going on there?

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so giving Qualcomm credit here, Qualcomm completely disrupted the Windows Notebook market. Some people can say that, “Oh, it was Apple.” I mean, Apple really initiated this, by dropping the M-bomb on the entire industry. Hats off to them in doing that because then that inspired gave an opportunity to Qualcomm and AMD and Intel had to react. So, hats off to them in not only bringing this amazing NPU to the table and enabling Copilot+ experiences, but even as impressive, bringing the performance and battery life CPU and GPU to the table. It’s pretty amazing. So, the first announcement was that they did a while back and announced to Computex was a 12 and a 10 core variant. And this latest out is an eight core Copilot+ plus PC processor. And you might be like, “Well, so what? It’s down core.” It’s very important. First and foremost, 799 price point. There are Copilot+ Qualcomm. PCs as expensive as 1699 out there. I would say most of them range at about the 1199 price point. And from a unit volume standpoint, there’s two, 3x the volume at that 799 price point and volume is very important. It’s important for scale to Qualcomm. More importantly, it gives scale to the partners who need to be able to write off below the line expenses and amortize those over a larger volume base. Qualcomm put it in the same socket, which means all the platforms that are out there that were already out there to drop in a piece.

This puts Intel in a very difficult position. And gosh, it reminds me of the good old days of AMD versus Intel that I was knee-deep in. Literally, Qualcomm drops an eight-core part that has as many cores as the highest end Intel part. And yeah, I get it. Intel cores are more efficient. Check, I get it. Higher performance, we’ll see about the battery life. But it puts it in a very difficult position in the consumer space. And here we go. It’s going to make benchmarks. The benchmarks wars have begun between Intel, Qualcomm and AMD. It puts Signal65 at the forefront of this. I’m recommending, I think Intel should drop some more detailed benchmarks within two weeks until the systems come out on September 24th. It’s sad that a non-tech pulled the plug, but that just shows the state of affairs today. And quite frankly, it doesn’t limit the need for third-party independent benchmarks. I think it actually increases the need for that. I don’t think the YouTubers are going to fill that up. Super exciting, man. Stepping back, more competition means more innovation and lower price points for everybody. And you need three healthy markets have three somewhat equally sized competitors.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean while the size is kind of somewhat still asymmetrical in Intel, it might feel like they’re the smallest right now because of market cap. They’re actually by quite a large amount revenue the biggest. Having said that, Pat, I agree with you. First of all, great takedown on the overall. And by the way, we need to get to AMD. We’ll probably have to come back maybe next week and talk about that, because they had a bunch of stuff. Their stuff started popping yesterday, so we didn’t have as much time to assess. But they’ve got a Copilot plus thing going on too. Pat, just because you hit a lot of Qualcomm. I was in the room. Cristiano Amon basically said, “Let’s have a benchmark off.” He’s ready. He’s basically saying, “I’ll take your numbers.” He’s kind of looking at it like the comparisons were across different parts. It was inconsistent. You put your best part against our mid part. That’s kind of the tenor and tone I got from the stage. And then the questions Ryan Shrout, our president of Signal, asked the first question, I asked the last question last. We open and closed that baby down.

And I got to spend a bunch more time with the executive team while I was there. There’s a lot of confidence at Qualcomm that they’re getting it right and the numbers won’t lie. Of course, there’s two sets of numbers though, Pat. There’s the numbers of what the benchmarks say, which we’re here to work on, and then there’s going to be the numbers of what the market says, which is what sells out and what people buy and what people use and what becomes more popular. And does Qualcomm really begin to become a household name in the laptop business? Pat, I mean, you and I have been through iterations and iterations of some of these first-generation. This Qualcomm part for the first time I’m using this device regularly and I’m saying, I could use this device regularly. This is good stuff. So, addressing sort of mid part of the market, Pat, is also super important. That’s where companies exist. They’re going to make this big shift in this big wave and this AIPC thing is just getting started. We knew it would only start this year. We were trying to temper the expectations. We’re starting to see this come to life. We’re seeing volume starting to ramp. I think it’s great that Intel is healthier and I think it’s great that Qualcomm’s going all in on making more and more competitive products. This is good stuff and like I said, we’ll come back to AMD later.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Hey, just one quick comment. This bodes well for the AIPC market.

Daniel Newman: It does.

Patrick Moorhead: Having Intel come here, guns of blazing makes an absolute huge difference. And yes. “Hey, Erich, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you for dialing in.”

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.

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