Could Qualcomm’s Oryon CPUs and commitment to open platforms spark an explosion of AI innovation that transforms how we interact with everything from our phones to our cars? At the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit, hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman speak with Qualcomm Incorporated‘s Cristiano Amon, President and CEO. They answer this question and dive into Qualcomm’s transition from communications to being at the forefront of AI.
Their discussion covers:
- How Qualcomm is shifting from communications to becoming a leading connected processor company for the AI era
- How Qualcomm’s custom Oryon CPU is bringing competition and innovation to the PC market, with performance exceeding Apple’s M-series chips
- The Snapdragon 8 Elite a the new flagship smartphone processor featuring the 2nd Gen Oryon CPU
- The importance of open platforms for flexibility and innovation in AI development.
- How AI is transforming user experiences across devices
- Qualcomm’s new automotive platform with Oryon is driving a software revolution in the industry, powering the future of in-vehicle experiences
Learn more at Qualcomm.
Watch the video below at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.
Or listen to the audio here:
Disclaimer: Six Five Media On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may reference their equity share price, but please do not take anything we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 here in amazing Maui. It’s been an incredible event. We’ve seen innovations on mobile, we’ve seen innovations on automotive, we got updates on PC. Daniel, been a great event, right?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, Pat, this is one of those places that you just never mind coming. The journey can be sometimes arduous, but when you get here, you just step outside, you feel the air, you feel the energy. And of course after, gosh, going near a decade of attending these events for Snapdragon Summit, it’s also been great to see the innovation. You and I have covered so deeply the business, the innovation, the diversification.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: We can’t talk enough about how it used to be about mobile, mobile, mobile, and now you’re seeing the automotive, the PC. The company has changed so much and it’s for the good.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And all that leverage of intellectual property, leverage of designs really sends, I think, a great message to investors too. So let’s bring in Cristiano Amon. Great to see you again. Welcome back to The Six Five.
Cristiano Amon: Very happy to be here talking to both of you. Thank you for coming to Maui for the Snapdragon Summit. I know both of you come for the content, not for the location.
Patrick Moorhead: Absolutely not.
Cristiano Amon: But look, it’s been great so far. As you said, it’s almost a decade, and really happy to have both of you here. Thank you.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it is great. You don’t exactly have to drag people out. Having said that, we all travel quite a bit, so this is one of those destinations where you land and you’re like, “I’m glad I’m here.” Cristiano, the last four months have been a pretty exciting time at Qualcomm. I mean, it’s always exciting, right? But in the last four months since you commercialized X Elite Snapdragon, your PC series, which is bringing new competition, it’s sort of changing the entire landscape of the industry. I’d love for you to just kind of share a little bit about how that journey has been of really going to market. There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm.
Cristiano Amon: Yes. One thing, I’m personally very happy about it, I think hopefully you could see the energy in the room. I think there’s a lot of momentum at Qualcomm. I think there’s a lot of positive momentum. I think I even heard from one of our partners, they actually said to me, “I’ve been thinking, Snapdragon brand is very sexy, and there’s so many things happening with Snapdragon.” I said, “Well, that’s good.” I think we see the energy. But I’ll answer the question in one way, is we have… Now that we got to this point, I think we have been talking about this for a while. The mission that we have been, we’re going to change this company. Qualcomm is a company that always reinvented itself. And we said we’re going to go from a communications company into a connected processor company for the transition to artificial intelligence, and we are going to go to other markets.
And I think the mission that we had is if we go to a different market, we need to build the leading platform, period. That’s what we did with Alto. And if we continue to do that with the show, with the new product we announce, and that’s what we did with PC. And I think we’re excited to see how much I think we’re getting recognition, including from our partners. Hopefully you saw the number of partners at the show about we’re doing something that is actually bringing a lot of excitement to the PC industry. Competition about CPU is good. I think it’s a good conversation to have. It’s driving a lot of consumers, the tech enthusiasts to talk about the platform. And I think we just did that at the show. We did the same thing again, restoring leadership in Android, and we’re going to continue doing that. We’re on a roll.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Observing the journey was just so special for me and my company. I’ve been in and around PCs going on 35 years, and I wrote something along the lines of this was the most amount of platforms and support that I had ever seen. I know you weren’t new to the PC market, but brand-new architecture. And typically people sit on the sidelines, right? And then we saw the competitive response. And just to be blunt, they had to tear up their roadmaps and start over to respond to what you had brought out. And even as recently, Dan and I were at Lenovo Tech World and saw a lot of mud being slung around there. Let me get your take on the competitive environment.
Cristiano Amon: Look, I think I’m going to answer your question, but first saying competition is a great thing, right? Competition is a great thing. And I’ll start at the beginning of this journey. When we were tasked, “Can Qualcomm bring leadership back to the Windows ecosystem?” That’s our mission. And we did that. And I think, and as you said, I love to see the response, people changing roadmaps to try to do it. And I have to say it, they need to try harder. It was not sufficient. But the exciting thing is you are bringing innovation back to the PC segment. You have not only the transition of now being faster than Macs, but you have the AI transition. And I think we’re seeing a positive response, I think the enthusiasm we see from companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo. And like I said, competition is good and it keeps the innovation, the technology roadmap forward. And one of the things we’re going to do, we’re not stopping here. So you guys need to book your ticket for Snapdragon Summit next year, because third-generation Oryon is going to be awesome.
Patrick Moorhead: Wait a second, did he talk about something that-
Daniel Newman: Is he previewing something here?
Patrick Moorhead: I think he is.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. We’re sort of a new show.
Patrick Moorhead: We kind of, yeah.
Daniel Newman: Mostly analysis though.
Patrick Moorhead: Okay. All right.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Well…
DanielNewman: So Cristiano, first of all, I couldn’t agree more. Competition is a huge benefit for us as all consumers, right? And when you drive that, you can change behavior, but you can address new things. Is it performance? Is it going to address the AI era? Are you addressing sustainability by the way of the sort of diametrically-opposed forces of AI and sustainability? A lot of opportunities there with what you can do on device and small models, and you talked about all that. I thought your speech was great and enjoyed your agent stuff. We’ll come back to that later. I want to talk about Oryon for smartphone a bit. That was a big announcement. You had a little fun out there. You did a few comparisons that were a little bit different compared to a handset device with a PC device out there. You didn’t put anything in a freezer, but you talked a little bit about it. But talk about this Oryon for smartphone announcement and why this is a great thing for the customers and partners.
Cristiano Amon: Yes. So look, I know we talk about PC, but I think one of the main things of this show is of course that’s where we always announce the latest and greatest Snapdragon 8. And this was the time that we applied our own custom CPU to Snapdragon 8 smartphone. And that news in itself was a combination of not only we bring our custom CPU to Snapdragon 8, this our now second-generation Oryon. And the big thing is this is the moment that we now restore the CPU leadership back to the Android ecosystem. So much so that we thought it’s time to even change the name. It’s going to be called now 8 Elite. And I think that’s what we did. We now say Elite.
And I think that’s very significant on that front, but also significant on becoming the platform that is going to enable, I think, one of the biggest changes that we’re going to see in mobile since the transition of feature phone to smartphone, which is going to be enabled by gen AI. So the other thing about the 8 Elite beyond Oryon is being the platform with an order of magnitude improvement in the ability to run models, multimodal engines that has enabled the future, which we have conviction is going to change experience to all AI first experiences.
Patrick Moorhead: So Cristiano, you brought the first Oryon PC, brought the second generation to smartphones, and you also today, Nakul talked about bringing Oryon to automotive, which you have a gigantic backlog. You’re getting design wins left and right, and whether it’s communications, cockpit, and ADAS SD. So what does a brand-new CPU bring to the table here? What part of the value proposition where you’re helping your customers?
Cristiano Amon: Yes. And I want to make a comment about this, and of course I’m very partial. I’m very partial. I love Qualcomm. I think Qualcomm has an incredible, deep-rooted engineering culture. And I am going to brag a little bit. Remember, we start doing our custom CPU, we added a new team to Qualcomm. And look what we did in a very short period of time, very short period of time. We launched the first-generation Oryon in PCs. We created a second-generation Oryon, we launched it in mobile with a 30% improvement after first generation. And then we built Oryon for automotive, which is now automotive safety grade. If you actually look at many CPUs out there, many don’t meet the requirements that you have for safety. We design a CPU with all the safety requirements, the steps, functions you need to take for automotive. All of this happened in a very short period of time.
Daniel Newman: Right.
Cristiano Amon: And I think now, to answer your question, is the announcement in automotive is probably one of the biggest and most powerful SoCs we have ever built. And it was a combination of trying to, same thing we did with phones, a combination of trying to bring Oryon, our own custom CPU, to this Snapdragon Elite cockpit, and Elite ride from a performance and power is significant change. The other thing we did was significantly increase the NPU capability. From one generation to the other, 12x. It’s not 2x, it’s 12x. And why is that? It’s because we believe that we are at the beginning of the software-defined vehicle transition, and unlike a phone, we have to future-proof the car.
Daniel Newman: Right.
Cristiano Amon: People don’t change cars every year or every two years, but this is a time the car is going to get better over time because of gen AI use cases and we just need to have all the computing power out there.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And to that point though, Cristiano, I do see that we’re sort of entering this era of continuous improvement and buy-in, right? Being able to update a car over the air, the fact that new software, new capabilities, new assistance and agents are going to create more demand later. There’s an elongated cycle I think for these devices that hasn’t existed in the past where it’s kind of hardware generation, hardware generation. And you actually started the event with kind of this vision of how you see the world. By the way, we share this vision. You and I have talked about it. The new app economy is going to be like an agent economy in some ways. And you’ve talked a lot about openness and why openness in AI is so important. I’d love for you to share with our audience a totally new viewpoint, something we’ve never covered with Cristiano before at all, how do you see all this evolving and why is openness so important?
Cristiano Amon: Yes I will start talking about this vision there that we lay out in the first part of the keynote. And I’m going to repeat to you guys what I said there. I have conviction. It’s so clear now to us, which is we have constructs in our head, because a smartphone is an incredible device, it’s our inseparable device. We can’t get away from it. Our digital life runs. And then we have this construct. We talk now about apps and App Store and OS. Because that transition, actually, just to make my point, before the smartphone we didn’t talk about apps, we talk about programs. You bring a program to your computer. And I think that construct got created in this incredible smartphone revolution. But now when you bring gen AI, and yes, besides this model that know all, do all, that you’re going to go inquiry in the cloud, there’s another underlying function of gen AI that a lot of people did not understand, is it can understand human language.
So if it understands human language, what you do, you put it at the front end of the computer that’s interfacing the human. And it doesn’t matter if you talk, if you text, if you touch, or even what you see. The model now can decode what you said with your image, understand it, and respond. And what that’s going to do is going to redefine what an app is. And I think that’s this vision that we talk about. You’re going to have an agent in your phone, and this agent is going to understand what you’re saying, and from that point in time, will take action. So the whole app experience does show us. One of the things I show in the keynotes because people are going to say, “Can you make this real for us, not make it abstract?”
And I said, “Okay.” Let’s say it’s a banking app, because the last thing you think about innovation is your banking app, and show how that’s going to change. You’re just going to ask information about your account, you’re going to get it, and then you may be doing something else, you may be buying something. You want to pay a bill and the agent is out there and you do your banking stuff for you all the time. You deconstruct the app. It’s not like a well-defined you go to the app, you do certain things. That function gets spread across everything you do, and that’s what the agent’s going to do. And I believe this future is going to start happening, and then it gets to the next part of your question.
Those platforms are going to change, and they’re going to be open, and they need to remain open. I think PC is already there. You can install any model. You see now with our Copilot+ PCs, a lot of the SaaS companies saying, “I’m going to install a model in the machine and you can go download and install it.” And we’re going to see that desire happening on phones, because I don’t know what your choice is going to be. You may, for all of your social engagement and how you interact with other people, you may want the agent to come from Meta. Or you may want your productivity agent to come from Microsoft. You may want your navigation agent to come from Google. And it’s going to be a whole new world, and we want to be ready for. And what we want to do is what we’re doing right now, we build the biggest platform that can run all of those agents without compromising battery life, make it open, available to everyone, and let’s see how the future holds.
Patrick Moorhead: So at a minimum, we’re looking at big disruption, disruption in the UI, the entire user experience. And quite frankly, if I look at the different players who intersect, that could change as well. Very exciting. And it sounds like you are enabling everybody to take part in this revolution, whether it’s on a smartphone, a PC, car, industrial edge?
Cristiano Amon: Absolutely. And look, and if you went to that first day of the Snapdragon Summit, you see that we’re not alone. You see how some of the many companies that are at the forefront of AI were just right there with us. You saw the video from Satya, you saw the video from Sam Altman, you saw the video from Mark Zuckerberg. And I think we’re at the beginning of that transition. Obviously the question that everybody ask, “Is it going to happen next year?” I don’t know. I think I can put a marker down. In five years that’s going to be the norm. And we are all going to be talking about those AI-centric experience and that’s how we’re going to live our lives. Between now and five years, I can’t really get the angle, the trajectory, but something like that’s going to happen.
Daniel Newman: Right. And they always say, Cristiano, kind of slow at first, then all at once. You won’t necessarily see it, and then until you have that sort of LLM inflection and all of a sudden it’s totally pervasive and it changes your life. And Pat, in a perfect world I would say, “Script me out, Pat.” And it would find the right bot, it would arbit the right bot of me and it would do this perfect exit. But Cristiano, I want to thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us at Snapdragon Summit. We’ll book our tickets. We’ll see you next year. I’m sure we’ll talk quite a few times in between.
Cristiano Amon: Very good. Always a pleasure talking to both of you.
Patrick Moorhead: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: And thank you all for tuning in, being part of The Six Five community. We appreciate it very much. Check out all our coverage here at Snapdragon Summit, and of course join our community and all of the coverage that Pat and I do across the industry and our team on The Six Five. But for now we got to say goodbye. We’ll see you all later.
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.
