Qualcomm wants to attack Nvidia and Intel with new AI chips

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Qualcomm Inc. unveiled Tuesday a new chip to accelerate the work in artificial intelligence, aiming to diversify beyond its dominant position in the field of mobile chips and in a growing market, now dominated by Nvidia Corp and Intel Corp.

At an event in San Francisco, Qualcomm announced plans to begin testing its new AI 100 Cloud chip with partners such as Microsoft Corp at the end of the year. Mbad production is expected to begin in 2020.

The new Qualcomm chip is designed for what artificial intelligence researchers call "inference" – the process of using an AI algorithm that has been "trained" with huge amounts of data in order, for example, to convert audio to textual queries.

Analysts believe that chips for accelerating inference will be the biggest part of the AI ​​chip market.

Nvidia has released special chips for this task and Intel is working with Facebook Inc. on another that will be released later this year. Cloud computing vendors, such as Amazon Web Services from Amazon.com and the Google Cloud unit from Alphabet Inc, are also creating their own inference chips.

All these activities mean that Qualcomm is running behind a rival on a crowded ground.

But Cristiano Amon, president of Qualcomm and head of the chip division, said the San Diego company takes a different approach by aiming to serve the smaller and simpler data centers that are proliferating around the world, so that consumers can benefit from faster response times. their applications connected to the Internet.

In order to serve these smaller "peripheral" data sites, Qualcomm focuses on AI chips that consume small amounts of electricity and generate little heat – a specialty developed in the manufacture of mobile phone chips, running with small batteries and living in pockets.

Rivals such as Intel and Nvidia are producing more powerful chips that dominate centralized data centers that aspire for electricity and need complex cooling systems.

"You can not rely on the big [data centre] buildings with air conditioning, "Amon told reporters at the San Francisco rally. "It's our bet: performance per watt."

Previously, Qualcomm had tried to leverage its mobile chip expertise in data center sales by seeking to compete directly with Intel's core business by selling processor chips based on phone chip technology. mobile. This effort has been largely negated as a cost-cutting measure.

"I think it's a good start for Qualcomm, but they have a lot to prove in the field of higher-performance accelerators," said Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy.