Gearbest Tech
[Gearbest]At the end of October, Qualcomm officially held the 2023 Snapdragon Summit. As usual, Qualcomm releases a new generation of flagship mobile platform at the annual Snapdragon Summit. The same is true this year. The Snapdragon 8 Gen3 mobile platform that arrived as promised did not disappoint. It has 4nm process, 30% performance improvement, 20% energy efficiency improvement, 25% GPU improvement, support for ray tracing and 240FPS games and other features. It's amazing. At present, Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, Honor, OnePlus, iQOO, Meizu, ZTE and other familiar mobile phone brands have corresponding models that are about to be released.
However, even so, this year's Snapdragon Summit is different from previous years. In addition to the Snapdragon 8 Gen3 mobile platform, Qualcomm also brought a new product-Snapdragon X Elite. This is the first product Qualcomm brings to us at the 2023 Snapdragon Summit, and it is also a Snapdragon flagship platform newly designed for PCs.
In fact, Qualcomm did not have a PC platform before. As early as 2016, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 835, which had an excellent reputation at the time, to PCs. At that time, Qualcomm not only reached a cooperation with Microsoft, but also cooperated with PC manufacturers such as HP and Asus to launch computers equipped with the Snapdragon 835 processor. It can be said that Qualcomm’s first foray into PC was quite a battle. However, although the lineup is luxurious, consumers are not buying it. After 2016, Qualcomm also changed its PC business strategy. Counting today's Snapdragon X Elite, this is the third time Qualcomm has launched an impact on the PC market. Perhaps due to the experience accumulated through failure, we can indeed see something different on Snapdragon X Elite.
Look at the PPT first
According to official data, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is built using TSMC’s 4nm process, which is one of the most advanced chip manufacturing processes currently. At the same time, this processor uses a customized Oryon CPU, with 12 3.8GHz large cores, supports dual-core turbo frequency to 4.3GHz, memory bandwidth of 136GB/s, and cache of 42MB. In addition, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite supports up to 3 USB 4.0 and 2 USB 3.2 Gen 2 and 1 eUSB 2, supporting the simultaneous use of up to three 4K UHD displays or two 5K displays.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Qualcomm Snapdragon . Low power consumption is also a traditional advantage of Qualcomm ARM PC chips. In terms of multi-core, the peak performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is 50% better than the Apple M2 processor. According to Qualcomm’s introduction in the promotional PPT, compared with X86 products of the same level, the performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is about twice that of competing products, whether on CPU or GPU.
From the perspective of hardware parameters, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is undoubtedly excellent. What is even more noteworthy is that with the popularity of the concept of artificial intelligence, Qualcomm has also increased its layout of chip AI capabilities on Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. In terms of NPU, Qualcomm said it aims to create a new era of localized AI processing and will become an important driving force for Microsoft Windows systems. Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite's Hexagon NPU can provide up to 45 TOP computing power and can run generative AI large-scale language models with more than 13B parameters on the device.
Some people are stressed
Looking at it now, after seven years of layout and two consecutive failures, Qualcomm seems to have shown its “real skills” on Snapdragon X Elite. However, although Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip has been released. But according to official reports, the first laptop equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite will not be released until mid-2024 – at least six months away. Compared with Long 8 Gen3, it can be said to be a world of difference. From this point of view, Qualcomm's release of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite half a month in advance seems a bit “too hasty.” However, at this point in the second half of 2023, Qualcomm really needs to do something.
Just on November 2, Qualcomm announced its fourth fiscal quarter and full-year performance reports as of September 24, 2023. Judging from the results, although Qualcomm's revenue and profit data have exceeded external expectations, they are still “horrible” compared with the same period last year. Data show that in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023, Qualcomm’s revenue was only US$8.67 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 24%, and its profit was US$1.489 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 48%. For the full year of fiscal 2023, Qualcomm's revenue was US$35.82 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 19%, and its profit was US$7.232 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 44%. In addition, according to official estimates, Qualcomm’s revenue in the next quarter will not exceed US$10 billion, even with the boost of Snapdragon 8 Gen3.
In the past two years, the smartphone market has shrunk very seriously, and Qualcomm, an important upstream manufacturer in the industry, has also been greatly affected. At the same time, competition in the mobile phone chip industry is becoming increasingly fierce. Qualcomm’s mistakes on Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 8 Gen1 gave competitors an opportunity. Starting in 2022, MediaTek’s Dimensity processors have seized a lot of the market that originally belonged to Snapdragon processors. Brands such as vivo and Redmi have begun to use Dimensity in large quantities on flagship models. At the end of August 2023, with the launch of Huawei Mate60 Pro, Kirin chips became active again. All this has put greater pressure on Qualcomm. Therefore, compared with 2016 and 2020, Qualcomm at the end of 2023 needs the PC market more urgently.
Some people are calm and gentle
Different from the past two adjustment strategies, Qualcomm today seems to have found a way to play to its advantages. The Qualcomm Snapdragon One of the differences between SoC and CPU in terms of structural modules is that the latter often has an independent NPU. Therefore, compared with products from competitors such as Intel and AMD, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips have their own first-mover advantage in the AI field.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said at the event that the Snapdragon X Elite processor can process 30 tokens per second when used in the terminal-side chat assistant for Windows 11 PCs. It can be seen that in addition to the traditional application track, Qualcomm also hopes to achieve “corner overtaking” in the PC field by deploying AI in advance. Of course, this can also be said to be a “helpless move” in a sense. After all, unlike competitors such as Intel, Qualcomm is at an absolute disadvantage in the software ecosystem, and it is not easy to make up for this weakness.
However, although Qualcomm has found its own advantageous track, at present, it is difficult for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip to cause major changes in the PC industry and market. Judging from previous Snapdragon platform notebooks, even if there are performance advantages, the high price of Snapdragon notebooks can completely allow users to ignore its advantages. At the same time, no matter how popular AI becomes, there will still only be a minority of consumers in need. Since the Snapdragon chip uses Qualcomm's self-developed GPU, many software is completely unusable in the absence of drivers and adaptations. For ordinary consumers, Snapdragon platform notebooks can only meet basic needs at best, and gaming and productivity are completely out of reach. Until this problem is truly resolved, the positions of AMD and Intel will not be affected by Qualcomm.
write at the end
In the past, Qualcomm's fate was closely related to the smartphone market. Of Qualcomm's total revenue of US$8.67 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023, nearly US$5.5 billion in revenue came from the sales of mobile phone chips. Over-reliance is obviously not a good thing, but compared with the PC market, which is almost solidified, developing the smart electric vehicle business seems to be a more promising direction. As for the Snapdragon X Elite chip, Qualcomm has certainly made changes, but it is difficult to bring real pressure to “toothpaste factories” and “massage parlors”.
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