The Six Five team discusses Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2023.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Pat, let’s dig into… Let’s talk about Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so this is going to be an easy one, top of mind, and this was all about on-device generative AI, right? Bringing it to the smartphone, bringing it to the PC. But if I had to prioritize, it would have to be the PC, right? The Elite X or the X Elite Snapdragon or the Snapdragon X Elite platform has finally been unleashed, and we saw some tremendous benchmarking, benchmarketing, all that good stuff.
Daniel Newman: Did you say benchmarketing?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Hey, I come up with one every month, Dan. So you can bank that and use that without giving me any credit. So anyways, though, we saw some pretty amazing performance and power off the CPU, the GPU, and the NPU that were pretty impressive versus the likes of Apple, Intel, and AMD. There’s an asterisk in that this is a platform that we’re likely going to see probably the middle of 2024, maybe the second quarter, versus products that are currently in market.
But the numbers were so big, right? We saw 2X this, heck, 10X at one point, that I feel innately that this platform is going to be competitive. And it’s being brought to you by a brand-new custom core based on the Nuvia acquisition that Qualcomm made a few years ago and a lot of development around that. A brand-new Hexagon NPU that’s delivering 45 TOPS just from the NPU. And just to give you a sense, that’s about 10X what’s available out there today on the PC.
So, I mean, I’m excited. I’m a big believer that it takes three strong people in market to have a full element of competition. And right now, it’s Intel at about 75% share and AMD at about 25. And here we go with Qualcomm. And of course, I’m leaving Apple out of it, but they don’t do Windows.
Daniel Newman: Yep.
Patrick Moorhead: And then Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, essentially this smartphone platform that has a lot of those incredible features that we talked about with Snapdragon X Elite, but bringing that to the smartphone, enabling just some amazing type of use cases. And I’m going to kind of end it here, Dan. I like to call it the Borg, okay? The Borg, if you’re into Star Trek, is where all of consciousness goes into one place, and everybody can leverage it. Well, in this case, everything that I’m saying on my phone, I’m texting, I’m messaging, all my video calls on my PCs, all my email, all my content is going to be essentially indexed on these devices. And I don’t think people are going to be comfortable sending any of that to the cloud because we have our personal lives.
But imagine with all that insight, we can have something make us the most amazing travel schedule, right? Or hey, what did Dan and I talk about last week? I have a terrible memory. I write everything down in my OneNote, and I’d love to be able to say, “Hey, when’s the last time that Dan and I talked about this technology or maybe even this deal or what plane you’re taking on your next trip?” So I think it’s upwards and onwards, and it’s game on, baby. I mean, Apple schedules a panic event for Monday. And you and I talked to Pat Gelsinger. He had some interesting things to say about Qualcomm, and AMD ripped up their roadmap and pulled it in. So it’s game on for Qualcomm.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think them as a third entrant into the Windows PC has been legitimized this week. And we knew since the Nuvia acquisition it was coming. Everything that was between here and there was kind of just a placeholder, and it was like a… You called it a marketing placeholder.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: Look, you covered a lot of the good ground, and I’m going to do something we haven’t done in a long time, but I’m going to actually try to keep our show somewhat on time.
Patrick Moorhead: Sorry about that.
Daniel Newman: No, it’s okay. It’s just as much my fault as it is yours. In fact, I’m going to ramble on and screw that up right now. But here’s what happened here. The CPU got legitimized from Qualcomm. They told a very strong story about CPU, GPU, NPU, and they made some very compelling cases for the Arm-based PC. We knew this was coming. If Apple does anything well, it legitimizes technologies. And with the M1 and M2 and some of the very outsized results that it was able to get despite M3 maybe not being as good, it did show that Arm… You can develop a very powerful PC platform on Arm. We’ve seen the same thing happen in the data center. And Qualcomm has been long committed to this path.
That’s the big thing that came out of this event. Like always, advancements in hearables, advancement in IoT, advancements in devices. A bevy of CEOs showed up and backed this CPU product. We saw Satya, Mark Zuckerberg. We saw some of the biggest names in tech all saying, “We’re committed.” But you know the fight, the fight on the street, in the channel, the go-to market is going to be real. And while Qualcomm can have the best product, best design, take its mobile provenance and take its low power to the PC, we all know that that’s not always necessarily what drives unit sales. So them getting that market is going to matter.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, and I will even go as far to say that more times than not, the best technology doesn’t win.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely.
Patrick Moorhead: It’s a combination of all factors-
Daniel Newman: Look at the iPhone.
Patrick Moorhead: … like you said. Exactly.
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.
