Q&A with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon
Q&A with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon
Computex 2024 Press Roundtable
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As with all the other major CEOs, Qualcomm held a general Press and Analyst Q&A session after their main keynote. The goal of these sessions is to address topics in greater detail, or depending on the publication, from their point of view. Qualcomm is uniquely positioned in this cycle as it is the primary partner with Microsoft for the new wave of CoPilot+ PCs, enabled with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors. What makes these processors more interesting is that they use an Oryon core, built by the team acquired from Nuvia, and promises to be the fastest Arm core available, and it all running Windows. The latest AI features are accelerated through that CPU core, the Adreno X1 graphics, and the onboard NPU – something that Qualcomm has enabled in almost a decade of its smartphone processors.
With Qualcomm being the newer entrant in the PC space, despite being the lead with Microsoft co-pilot, the fact that the company had 22 OEM devices to talk about means there were a lot of questions about messaging, killer applications, but also how it ties into Qualcomm’s historic leadership positions in smartphone, such as 5G wireless connectivity and gaming performance.
The format of the Q&A started with 30 minutes directly at CEO Cristiano Amon, and then 30 minutes with executives Alex Katouzian (Group GM of Compute, Smartphone, and XR) and Kedar Kondap (SVP and GM of Compute and Gaming). The following transcription has been updated for readability.
Cristiano Amon Opening Remarks
We're doing this in the morning because most of you are running x86, and if we did this in the afternoon, you'd probably be running out of battery life! Next year we'll perhaps do this at midnight!
I'm sure many of you were with us at the keynote yesterday. I think this exciting time for Qualcomm. It’s another great example of what this company can do, and the technologies that we have been developing over the many, many years. These technologies find themselves incredibly competitive as new industry and new markets develop. I think we see it's an incredible one because it is changing, and AI is completely redefining the personal computer experience.
The opportunity for a new partner of Microsoft to bring big overall technology leadership to the PCs is exciting. I think as Qualcomm we have done that in automotive, and now we're doing that in the PC space. We're excited to see so many devices launching and as I said in the keynote, we're here to stay. I think we see an incredible opportunity for innovation and it's just the beginning. With that, I’m happy to take any questions.
Q: Carolina Milanesi, Creative Strategies - How you are thinking about creating a cohesive message in the PC ecosystem? There is lots of choice in the silicon, but everyone is arguing about one thing – the TOPS number. Consumers don't understand it. So do you all come together, or is that Microsoft's job?
A: To clarify the PC messaging - if you're going to buy a Win11 PC. If you see a blue at the home screen, that’s not a Copilot PC. We think that's clear for customers who want an AI PC – it’s a very simple thing for the customer to see. It’s a great job done by Microsoft and all to come to make it very clear what is that experience.
I feel at the end of the day, the messaging is going to be settled, and you have started to see the conversation change around the NPU and its performance. The answer is going to be simple – customers will understand the form factor, the benefits in battery life, and the performance of Copilot+. It's going to point to Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus. It’s not a coincidence - it's a technical thing as to why it's only Qualcomm right now - it's all about the compute power needed to run AI all the time.
Today, it’s only on Qualcomm, but this is going to change. Sometimes we're going to have to wait to see that change. So we tried to see how developers can use these machines. Microsoft uses this for copilot+. But you're going to have many developers on the PC using the NPU, so that's why we have demonstrated the capability. We're going to start to see those use cases. Fundamentally, AI is making a transition in Windows as significant as Windows 95 did for operating systems.
It's very clear to us that AI is changing everything. Microsoft has done incredible work – Microsoft has been transformed by AI. It's not only the cool thing to do to buy a copilot+ device, but it also means that the technology leadership is also back in Windows.
Q: Unknown – Today you are saying Snapdragon X Elite is to make the PC market reborn. This was built with Nuvia technology. Will Qualcomm use Nuvia technology to make the datacenter reborn?
A: What is good about AI? To give more detail - it is true that if you look historically at what is happening, Arm could not license a CPU that would restore a Windows ecosystem performance. The highest performance CPU was not an Arm licensed CPU. Our acquisition of Nuvia, and what led to the team develop Oryon from the ground up, does that. It was necessary to have that element of capability to be the fastest CPU you could bring to the Windows ecosystem. The desire to be the fastest CPU on a Windows ecosystem. X Elite is only part of the story - it's the CPU yes, but also we have a disruptive NPU to allow Microsoft to use it for copilot+. But we also bring Snapdragon mobile features to the PC.
Now we've also said we've been executing. We're designing our own CPU across the entire business. Oryon is the first of those. You're going to see what we do in mobile, then to automotive. It creates optionality for us in the datacenter - we're careful not to set expectations about the DC.
We have been getting some datacenter designs, our AI 100 Ultra, because training has moving to inference. The TCO of a datacenter is important. Our NPU has good battery life, and that's being understood in automotive – it’s the reason we’re winning a lot of ADAS and autonomy in automotive because you can't put a server with server-type thermals and power consumption into a trunk of an EV! With that it creates options at the edge, we get design wins – we have it in data centers, partners such as G42 and AWS. It creates opportunity as the datacenter moves to Arm, and we have assets. But we're focused today to bring the technology to PCs, then to smartphones, and automotive. We're executing on this massive growth opportunity at the edge.
Q: Adrian Franco – You’ve mentioned your willingness to scale the technology. Do you plan to show us a roadmap to show muscles up the stack? Do you plan to show us a roadmap showing your muscles, from Chromebooks up to the equivalent of a MacBook Pro 16 with bigger GPUs and stuff?
A: One of the things in the keynote is that we have been on this journey for a while to get here. It's not an easy transition for Windows, x86 to Arm, so we had multiple generations to optimize the emulation and native performance. Snapdragon X Elite is how we have arrived, and it supports Copilot+. In the keynote, we said you should see Qualcomm in every form factor in PCs - desktops and mini-PCs and tablets. I think you’ve just seen the beginning of a roadmap – you should think about Qualcomm in PCs will be no different to the phone space. It's a multi-tier approach – I can’t really disclose our evolution of X Elite, but you should expect significant performance over many vectors.
Q: Bob O'Donnell, Technalysis - You fight your competitors in a big way. How do you maneuver now? Because everyone is a little scared and have decided to speed up their efforts. How does Qualcomm stay in front firstly on roadmap, but also strategically - how are you thinking to maneuver and move the chess pieces around?
A: We always have respected the competition - we always know we have formidable competitors. We work hard every day, and that’s the history of Qualcomm - we never want to be complacent. You’ve seen me say that our philosophy is gladiatorial - we fight for the right to go to the coliseum every time. Have our competitors said that? But we come from mobile - the most wild competitive environment ever. We have competitors all over the world. We're not a stranger to competition. The track record of Qualcomm - one good thing about this is we've seen many transitions, such as 2G to 3G, 3G to 4G, 4G to 5G. Players come and go, but we didn’t go anywhere. We're still here. We will take that philosophy in the PC space.
Q: Rich Woods, XDA - New features today on Windows are now hardware dependent – an increase from 10 TOPS to 45 TOPS and future generations are going to make big jumps as well. Do you think there are going to be additional hardware dependent Windows features, starting with Copilot+, that will drive future adoption in PCs?
A: Yes, absolutely. It's great that people benchmark against Qualcomm. It shows we have arrived and we have legitimacy in the market. I’ve said it before, but the interesting thing is that AI is changing how those devices work fundamentally. It's an intent based OS now. The interesting thing is how Microsoft settled on this NPU architecture with us – the CPU and GPU have a job to do, but now you have this other computing engine that they have to run all the time. The compute that's required - we have one of the most aggressive roadmaps in PC. It’s also true in phones, it’s also true in cars. You're going to see significant improvement in performance. We’re working on that, and I'm sure others are doing too, because it's new. The news cycle on the PC is going to be driven by the experience and apps change using the AI engines. What I like about it, it's in the same form factor that's expected to be thin - we now have to add a lot more compute power. In phones, you can't have a big phone that eats power, so over 12+ years we've been working on keeping the device the same form factor without ballooning the design. In the PC, everyone is talking about TOPS, no-one is talking about power. We're talking about power. We're taking a phone approach to the PC. NPUs will increase in performance gen-on-gen.
Q: Vlad Savov, Bloomberg - What proportion of your chips, your most advanced chips, are manufactured on TSMC? Do you have any concerns about being overly reliant on a single supplier?
A: Right now, TSMC is our main leading edge supplier. But we’re probably the only company that has dual sourced on leading nodes: TSMC and Samsung. I think it’s because it takes a lot of effort to design a chip for a leading node. Historically both have worked with Samsung and that will continue to be the play.
Q: Jim McGregor, Tirias - So far with X Elite, you've followed the mobile roadmap. Monolithic, it has this much performance at a given power. I’ll be honest with you, in a year, software developers will want double the performance. They’re going to want to double the TOPS, or more. It's going to keep going for years. So (a) can you continue on this, or are you looking at chips to double TOPS every year, and (b) especially as you start looking at these other platforms, are you considering external GPUs or accelerators to meet those touch points?
A: Very good question, but I will not announce Gen 2 today! But what I can tell you - what I said at the keynote is how we think about it. X Elite is the first generation. What we’ve tried to do with X Elite is to have performance leadership. You should expect the goal of next product is to also have that leadership. There is going to be demand for more compute on all vectors - the chipset design cycle is often two years, and we're well underway with a comprehensive roadmap for PCs. Stay tuned!
Q: Toms Hardware (didn’t recognize) - Everyone is asking for more power in X Elite, but when will we see less power? It makes sense to target the top of the market, but most market volume is not at the top. Also with the NPU, it opens up the business opportunity, and means better AI development - what's your vision? Right now it’s as if it is just AI for the rich, not for all.
A: OK, so look - the mission for X Elite was to restore performance leadership. At the launch we had X Elite and X Plus chipsets – this means you can get a Copilot+ device with no compromise in AI in the $600 notebook range. So we actually started off with more range. To the second question – we came from mobile, and in mobile, everyone has a phone. You've seen we can scale performance up and down, and that’s what we’re bringing to the table. We will develop a roadmap top to bottom to maximise participation in the SAM.
Q: Unknown – For Qualcomm’s opportunity with X Plus to the tablet market. Why I ask this question is because we think general AI and the natural language input is not just for PC, but also for the tablet market.
A: There's no limit. In the Windows ecosystem you see lots of form factors, including great tablets and detachables. But I agree with you - X Elite makes a great tablet!
Q: Hadlee Simons, Android Authority – You have said that the PC will get better over time. Does that mean if I buy X Elite today, it will get next generation device features too?
A: What's different right now is that AI is going to change fundamentally our interface to devices like the PC. Microsoft is ahead on the PC, but it's going to happen on phones, in cars. Features like having a pervasive NPU, and the goal is to predict your behaviour, makes it's personal as well. The PC becomes more adaptable and personable as it adapts. But also developers now, on this platform, are creating AI based applications - we're at the beginning of this.
It's one way to look in the past to make a connection. But when we were talking about 3G, in phones, I had many of them! Then smartphones showed up. The first smartphone had 10 apps! Blackberry did their own OS with those 10 apps. But that wasn't the point. Those smartphone apps become 100s and 1000s - the experience is the app. Today, I think the AI apps will expand on PC - we're just at the very beginning. Right now we see 10s on the machine today, we will go to 100s to 1000s. That's the transformational ability.
Q: Paul Alcorn, Tom's Hardware – The CEO of Arm said at the event that he expects Arm to be 50% of the Windows market in 5 years. Is that realistic, and how much of that can you address?
A: I will subscribe to that! Different OEMs are talking are different numbers, and they're saying some different numbers in earnings. But that's the opportunity we have. The reason this is important, because it could get missed in conversation, is that historically when you have a new version of windows it takes a long cycle to adopt in the enterprise. For example, today still a lot of Windows 10 installs. But this is different today because of Copilot+. This is a new type of machine with new use cases, and more comprehensive feature list. I expect the transition will be faster now. It's a bigger SAM, and there's logic behind those numbers. We're doing a lot of work to bring Oryon that works on Arm to this industry.
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At this point, CEO Cristiano Amon left, replaced by Alex Katouzian and Kedar Kondap.
Q: Mike Feibus – In the keynote, Cristiano said the money slide had 22 laptops at launch. For me, the real big thing is having seven OEMS on stage - that's not something happened before. You have a TOPS advantage today, and Copilot+ exclusivity for a few months. OEMs see the advantage now, so what is your sustainable advantage?
AK: All 22 systems came from 7 OEMS, and they see a disruptive solution to bring a different kind of PC to market. In conjunction with copilot+, the PC is a renewed series of product, through consumer and enterprise. In Enterprise, Windows 10 is sunsetting, and Windows 11 is picking up. These companies will be moving to Copilot+. You'll see productivity and time savings - those apps will be beneficial to enterprise. They see our roadmap moving forward. It looks like we can sustain moving over years.
KK: When you think about the architecture that X Elite brings, we have performance leadership and performance per watt leadership. It shows leadership for specific cores in the SoC. We agree that TOPS isn't the best metric, but there is no constant way to measure it today. If you look at the ISVs, they can advantage of the NPU, and the heterogeneous cores. It’s also the way you calibrate the silicon, and the battery life is the key. We want to show leadership. It is significant, and the NPU will shine over time.
Q: Tech Radar - Gaming is an important area for X Elite. Are we that far away from dedicated GPU become a thing of the past?
AK: I think for casual gaming, that's the trend. High-end gaming is always going to have dedicated hardware, but the section or the market we're going for is productivity. We’re making sure users have a great experience with AI, and with casual gaming. At the end of the day, we’ve optimized multiple games and engines on Android - we're going through the same process on GPU for Windows. We'll continue to work with engines and developers to optimize for our GPU. As our roadmap goes on, there will be more capability. For this market, maybe the discrete GPU is becoming a secondary item. For now though, we're focused on AI performance and battery life.
Q: Anton Shilov, AnandTech/Tom’s Hardware – Today you have 20+ design wins with X Elite, but how many are equipped with 5G modem? Also we didn’t see performance in gaming - will we be able to plug in an external graphics card?
KK: To your first question, there are a few launching with 5G, the OEMs will announce which ones. Rich from XDA in the front row says it’s 3!
On gaming, we're being careful positioning this PC to not confuse consumers. There are PCs that focus on multiple markets - prosumer, gamers, and those are purpose built. We're not strangers to gaming - we have those relationships, and you saw a small snippet at our keynote. But it takes time. We're not overpositioning this as a gaming PC today, but we're working closely with the developers and performance will improve over time. It's a powerful GPU, and some games run at 30FPS, some higher, but there's a broad application.
On external graphics, there’s nothing technical that limits plugging in discrete graphics.
Q: Dave Altavilla, Hot Tech – I want to ask about your position on security – there is some trepidation on security when it comes to AI PCs. What's X Elite's differentiation here?
KK: At a macro level, for now we support Pluton with Microsoft. Microsoft has talked about responsible AI. A lot of the partnership with Microsoft for X Elite experiences are taking into account security metrics. It's super important for us.
AK: On device security and AI makes sense and you can have full control of your data. If it leaves the device, partners have to help us with data security and privacy. We have secure enclaves to help, secure processor, all those capabilities.
Q: CHIP Magazine – You mentioned performance leadership in notebook market. AMD says they have a device with 50 TOPS in July. Performance leadership is perhaps gone by July? Rene, Arm CEO, introduced the Cortex-X925 with Arm v9.2. How do you define tech leadership - is this focused on performance per watt? How do you go forward to preserve leadership?
AK: When they post performance, you have to figure out how it's getting measured. On TOPS, first you have to figure out if the model is quantized or optimized for the use cases. Also memory bandwidth from NPU - in LLMs, the more the better (editor – for tokens per second, the initial token is usually compute bound). You do have to look at performance per watt as well - if you bring performance with no power boundaries, that's not what people are looking for from a user perspective. We have an optimized process. We have heterogeneous accelerator designs that make use of different cores for optimal performance per watt. We have to be very careful, both on our end and on the competitors end as to what performance leadership is. It's not simply power and TOPS. We have an efficient way of doing it on X Elite and upcoming devices. We have to do apples to apples as much as possible, that has to be the priority.
Q: Rich Woods, XDA - Can you expand on the philosophy on dedicated graphics. No-one is asking for discrete for performance akin to a Mac Studio, but what can QC do?
KK: Right now we believe that what we have with X Elite, for all the use cases we're looking at, the GPU is plenty. It's not a high end gaming laptop, it's for casual gaming. We have powerful CPU cores, we have enough performance across our CPU/GPU/NPU, so we believe we are in good shape!
AK: Cristiano showcased in the keynote a video of a laptop GPU and a copilot+ laptop running 20C cooler on AI workloads. Power is an important measure! Secondarily, but just as important, these models are pervasive in the background, and multiple models at that. In the future 20/30/40 of them could be running to enable full copilot+ in the background. The difference between battery on NPU vs. GPU is night and day - it's minutes vs. hours. So battery life to advertise, and the models are pervasive, if you run on GPU, you're not going to get the user experience. So NPU is the only place Microsoft is making Copilot+ functions real. We're leading that. GPUs can be in the PCs, they have functions, but for a lot of AI functions, you will see the NPU maxing out and the CPU/GPU are zero.
Q: Ian Cutress, More Than Moore – I’m worried because a lot of what’s been presented this week and a lot of what Microsoft presented at their event feels North America-centric. A lot of vendors are promoting their devices for a North American audience. Ultimately the goal is to make this pervasive for the global market, and ok I guess I can go order some systems in my region today, but the messaging is still very NA focused. Can you go deeper into what you’re doing in different regions, perhaps with Microsoft or as it relates to software partners as to how you’re building out that messaging globally?
KK: I’m not sure why you feel the messaging is restricted to North America only?
IC: It simply feels that way, especially at this time!
AK: He’s saying he wants a British keyboard!
KK: I was just telling Alex this yesterday – I was testing one of the OEM platforms myself, and it has a British keyboard on it. I was wondering why the keys were different!
KK: But back to the question, I don’t think that premise is true. Certain countries have certain regulations and requirements – those are being addressed. But for the most part I think Copilot experiences will run just as fine in most countries. I think a lot of the work with ISVs is not restricted, in fact we have work that we’re doing in India, work in China, work in Europe and many of the other regions with ISVs that are specific to that region. This is whether it is natural language or others, the co-creation stuff. So the work that’s going on is pretty global. But I’ll take your word that we need more marketing outside of North America!
AK: If you look at the Qualcomm AI Model Hub, the models that are coming in from everywhere that are being embedded into apps. If you look at the models, or the models we already have that are quantized and optimized for our platforms, for handsets and PCs, are from multiple different locations. So if there’s an issue getting AI functions into the PC we’re going to try to get that covered. Also there’s local AI models, with some of the OEMs that want to run there, we’re optimizing for that as well. On the marketing campaigns and where we’re trying to launch and promote this product is global. We’re going everywhere.
KK: When Lenovo went on stage at our keynote, they showed localized software with AI models, and we’ve helped optimize those models for those devices. It can be very localized in many ways. Acer too.
Q: Vlad Savov, Bloomberg – On the same topic, can you comment on China specifically?
AK: We do specifically work with OEMs in China for the models they want to put on local devices. We help quantize, optimize, run them, test them. Obviously some of the things that are running in China, the data that’s gathered, has to stay in China, so there is some work to prevent some of those models from crossing over. But we work with them completely – on handset, on PC, on automotive.
Q: Nicolas La Rocco, ComputerBase Germany - A big inflection was acquisition of NUVIA. How were you able to integrate that team, and how is that team working within Qualcomm?
AK: Once that acquisition was made, the cooperation of that team with the QC team was phenomenal. The work that was put into making X Elite was outstanding – from the system engineering, the CPU design, integration into the system, software issues, working with Microsoft, and the continuous round the clock support from both teams integrated together was amazing. Cristiano said that you must attend the Tech Summit this fall to see how we move that core into mobile and automotive. The team is fully integrated into the QC system, cooperation is ongoing, and it's never been better.
KK: It's one Qualcomm now. It's one engineering team. We've done this with other acquisitions. It's now just one team.
What is meant by "If you see a blue at the home screen, that’s not a Copilot PC."?