Qualcomm Inc on Tuesday unveiled a new chip for speeding up artificial intelligence (AI) work, aiming to diversify beyond its stronghold in mobile phone chips and into a fast-growing market dominated by Nvidia Corp and Intel Corp.
At an event in San Francisco, Qualcomm said that it plans to begin testing its Cloud AI 100 chip with partners such as Microsoft Corp later this year, with mass production likely to begin next year.
The chip is designed for what AI researchers call “inference” — the process of using an AI algorithm that has been “trained” with massive amounts of data to, for example, translate audio into text-based requests.
Photo: Bloomberg
Analysts believe that chips for speeding up inference are to be the largest part of the AI chip market.
Nvidia has released special chips for the task and Intel is working with Facebook Inc on one that is to be released later this year.
Cloud computing vendors such as Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud unit are also making their own inference chips.
All that activity means Qualcomm is entering a crowded field behind its rivals.
However, Qualcomm president and chip division chief Cristiano Amon said that the company is taking a different approach by aiming to serve the smaller, simpler data centers that are proliferating around the world so that consumers could benefit from faster response times for their Internet-connected apps.
To serve those smaller “edge” data sites, Qualcomm is focusing on AI chips that consume small amounts of electricity and generate little heat — a specialty it developed when making chips for mobile phones, which run on small batteries and live in pockets.
Rivals such as Intel and Nvidia make more powerful chips that dominate in centralized data centers that suck up electricity and need complex cooling systems.
“You can’t rely on big [data center] buildings with air-conditioning,” Amon told reporters. “That’s our bet — performance per watt leadership.”
Qualcomm tried before to parlay its mobile chip expertise into data center sales, when it aimed to compete directly with Intel’s core business by selling central processing unit chips based on mobile phone chip technology. That effort has largely been wound down as a cost-cutting measure.
“I think this is a good start for Qualcomm, but they have a lot to prove in the higher performance accelerator space,” Moor Insights & Strategy founder Patrick Moorhead said.
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