0:00
So Cristiano, you run Qualcomm and your technology powers many Android phones, meta smart glasses, a bunch of coming wearables, and a growing number of cars.
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0:10
And I want to get into all of that, but I want to start with something else, which is you also have a very interesting view of the US and China.
0:18
Qualcomm has a very strong Snapdragon brand in China.
0:21
That's something I've actually learned a lot being here at the summit that you guys are having, um, is just the rabid fan base for Snapdragon in China.
0:29
And I think that gives you a unique window into the into the two markets.
0:32
Um, and I want to start with how people in China are feeling about AI relative to the United States.
0:39
The sentiment when you look at the sentiment and how it pulls on AI around the world, it's very different based on uh geographies.
0:47
And maybe could you contrast the two a little bit?
0:49
If I do a compare and contrast the broad adoption of AI into the devices and in consumers, I see I see that happening in China very very fast.
1:04
In the United States, I see the development of frontier models and enterprise adoption AI.
1:08
Those are kind of dominates the conversation.
1:10
That's the difference in conversation between both.
1:13
>> And when you talk to people in China about AI, does it feel like they're imagining maybe a different future than people in America?
1:19
the the sentiment in America when you when you look at the polling it's incredibly negative.
1:23
polling it's incredibly negative. Look every new technology has it will bring uncertainty right so you know it's interesting I you know you uh if you go back in time and you see different technology transition some of the concerns obviously what happened in the
1:40
United States given my perspective is AI has been an important uh productivity tools for a number of sectors for example company like Qualcomm I was even asked today in in a different conversation said well you guys are doing a lot You're transforming the company, you're doing a lot of things in parallel. How can you allocate capital
1:56
How can you allocate capital to do all of those things in parallel?
2:00
And if you actually look, we have been relatively expanding the company with kind of a flat uh scale of operating expenses.
2:08
A great part of this is productivity gains using AI to the development process.
2:12
So, so you have clearly those aspects of AI for productivity games and they're obviously concerns about is that going to impact jobs or are companies uh you know going to leverage their own AI and they're not going to need as much manpower.
2:27
So, and that conversation is probably universal.
2:31
I don't think that's unique uh to the United States.
2:34
You do have this conversation about data center.
2:36
Data centers is is massive.
2:37
You look at those massive deployment.
2:40
you need more and more compute.
2:42
It's a wall I think of the demand for compute.
2:45
Um and you obviously have concerns about is this going to increase my electricity bill.
2:50
So those conversations I think are natural.
2:53
The latter I don't see it in China.
2:56
I see more of uh it's it's an it's like a feature is an evolution.
3:02
The two countries are looking this a little bit different.
3:06
different. I think for example uh China has been really focused on physical AI um and everything on the edge there's a bigger focus on on China right now but I believe in general because of the uncertainty associated with AI you're
3:24
going to have a lot of questions and and to be frank we're in the early days of AI early very early I I like to do this metaphor it's almost like in the early days of the internet if I had to say, "Okay, we already know what's going to happen. Alta Vista is going to win the
3:38
Alta Vista is going to win the search and Map Quest is going to win the map and Orcut's going to win the social media."
3:44
No, I think we still have a lot of things that needs to happen on AI and some of those questions will be answered.
3:51
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Right now in the US, a lot of people are talking about this idea of pacing, pacing the frontier of AI development.
4:35
You're seeing things like the hugging face breach, the models becoming more capable, cyber risks increasing, and I'm curious where you stand on this cuz you you the company and you you you've been in Washington.
4:48
Um you're obviously a voice in the policy space in the US on this.
4:50
Um when you when you're seeing this debate, what do you make of it right now?
4:54
So, I'll provide my opinion and and I will I two comments I think.
4:59
First, I'll give you my opinion for free.
5:01
So, it may not be very good.
5:03
I'm just going to give it for free.
5:05
Second is it's just an opinion.
5:07
This is a changing uh landscape.
5:07
It's hard uh it's hard to to be certain about this.
5:13
But I think the answer is never is never on the book ends.
5:15
The answer is somewhere in the middle. Right.
5:17
So, so first it's it's a brand new technology and uh and it has a lot of potential.
5:25
There is a development road map and continue to invest in development road map.
5:28
It's going to be important and uh the second part of it it's it's also important to have guard rails.
5:34
It's for example the yes there's a lot of comments about what are the risks associated with AI but let me talk about some of the more practical risks.
5:45
some of the more practical risks. you know cyber security it's it is it is a very reasonable risk because everything is digital I think of the reason AI exists is because we as humans digitize everything you know you have all this
6:02
digital information every area of computing power but this surface area that runs on software is very very big so if you have models that can find vulnerability on things and they can hack things and you don't need to be, you know, a cyber warfare specialized team. Anybody can get a model and do it.
6:22
Anybody can get a model and do it. It's a problem.
6:24
You need to have control.
6:26
You need to have very serious companies.
6:28
You need to have the right regulation.
6:30
You have to have the hard guard band is no different than other major uh technology like that.
6:35
So, I think that's really the answer. It's not in extremes.
6:40
It's not like stop it uh or go full speed. It's do it responsibly.
6:43
I think there's nothing wrong with that.
6:48
And um and have guard rails in our little world. We do chips. We do we do the chips.
6:54
Uh we do chips to do the >> chips are not little, but that's okay.
6:57
>> It is little compared to some of the other big companies and we do all of this math.
7:01
We are building in the hardware hooks and controls and knobs uh for you to store your information security for you to decide whether you want your personal graph to be stored uh or not.
7:14
and uh and and to be able to have controls.
7:16
I think that's that's an important thing.
7:18
All of those companies need to do it with responsibility.
7:22
>> You traveled to China with President Trump in May and when you're in those rooms, I'm curious what do you hear from other world leaders about how they're grappling with AI and the risks.
7:32
>> Look, there is obviously there's a lot of uh semiconductor.
7:35
The industry that I happen to be became a geopolitical industry, I think, right now.
7:39
So, you have you have to be part of those conversations.
7:43
AI it's important in every part of this conversation.
7:45
I think there's a common understanding about um how to do those things responsibly.
7:50
how to do those things responsibly. And then the other part more of the conversations that I'm part of there's a lot of u strong healthy commercial uh in and partnerships uh kind of relationship between American enterprise and China
8:06
enterprises and those relationships what I have seen then hopefully I will see next week those relationships actually create a very strong point of stability and common understanding I think between the two countries and if that's the role that we can continue to play. That's the
8:22
That's the role we're going to play.
8:25
>> Let's talk about the smartphone.
8:25
So, it's really interesting.
8:27
I mean, the smartphone market is obviously massive.
8:31
It's one of the most consequential, if not the most consequential computing markets to date.
8:35
At the same time, um it's not growing like it once was.
8:38
I think I saw there's a stat that it's expected to shrink maybe about 14% in terms of overall units shipped this year, maybe go down a little more next year.
8:48
And I'm curious to hear from you, how much of that is, you know, the incredible spike in memory costs and component costs for these devices and just sticker shock that consumers have and you know the phones are good now and you know maybe you don't want the next you don't need the next one if the price goes up you can hang on to the one you've got and how much of it is something bigger.
9:07
>> Okay, there's a lot in that question. Yes, there's a lot.
9:09
So let's go break that down a little bit.
9:11
So first I'm going to give you some of the facts.
9:13
So interesting thing and maybe people don't realize yet the smartphone market has yet to recover yet to recover what the market was before the pandemic.
9:26
Uh the market is still smaller now it's artificially smaller but still smaller than what used to be in 2019. Right?
9:34
So the so the market uh has been uh somewhat uh still recovering uh from what the market used to be and there's a number of factors for that.
9:46
I think one of it is of course is a great thing everybody in the world has a smartphone so it became a mature market.
9:52
It became kind of a replacement rate any and it's totally normal.
9:57
Look I probably going to show my age but I started working on one G.
10:02
So I've been through every cycle and at the end we're almost to six. >> Yes.
10:06
At the end of the cycle right you do get um a portion that you know the market gets to state of maturity become more of a replacement rate market.
10:18
Having said that the smartphone is a big market. Uh it's 1.
10:20
2 billion phones sold every year.
10:24
Even if you don't want any new feature you use your phone a lot after two three four five years you're going to buy a new one.
10:31
However, within that base, there are a couple things that happened which has been um very telling.
10:38
The premium and the high tier as a percentage of the total market continue to expand and it's been like clockwork year over year.
10:44
Even in a compressed market, the premium tier continue to expand.
10:48
And the reason is because generation after generation, people are doing more with their phone.
10:55
I'm sure you still have a laptop.
10:55
the laptop didn't get replaced by the phone.
11:00
But there are certain things that you say, "Oh, I need my laptop for this.
11:04
This long email I'm going to write.
11:04
I'm just going to wait until get to the laptop. I'm going to do it."
11:08
But now with AI, what we're seeing is more and more more workload shift to the phone.
11:14
So people want better phones.
11:14
People want phones that are more capable.
11:16
So independent of this transition to an Aentech phone, we're starting to see the premium tier increasing. Okay.
11:22
The next layer the market is now artificially suppressed because of what happened with memory.
11:30
Memory prices went up 5x to 6x.
11:34
So what happened is the premium tier the high tier has been more resilient.
11:36
Um yes it's more expensive but consumers see the value they want to buy the phone.
11:42
We saw the mid mid tier low tier has been way more sensitive.
11:44
So the market is down 20% this year because of the high memory prices.
11:52
It's not a demand problem.
11:54
there's now a pent-up demand in the marketplace.
11:55
The silver lining on this, it's happening at an interesting time when AI smartphones are starting to come and uh and it could create opportunity for people want to buy now an AI smartphone.
12:08
We have seen this market in cycles.
12:11
So for for the past few years as you said not a lot of excitement about the phone market.
12:16
Oh the phone market is does not grow.
12:18
We have because of this driver of premature expansion.
12:21
We have been growing uh you know in in the Android market doubledigit compounded annual growth rate just on more of this premature expansion share gains and more content because people want a better phone.
12:37
But my prediction is nobody wants to talk about the phone market, everybody's data center or their markets until the AI super cycle and then when that happens and 6G happens, I think there will be a lot of conversations about phones.
12:52
It's important to to say phones are not going to go anywhere and it is the largest development platform ever created by mankind and uh humans are not going to go travel to a data center ring the bell and say give me some AI.
13:06
You're gonna use that to the mobile devices and they're gonna have a part in this uh picture.
13:12
>> I want to know what you mean by AI smartphone.
13:14
But first, you all showed Muse on the screen during the keynote which is taking you know the Silicon Valley world the early adopter world by storm and then there's also products like Instinct and others and Grockbot and all these things.
13:24
And I want to stress test what you're saying about workloads moving to the phone because I mean these products are browser virtual machines in the cloud right like Muse is running a browser in a cloud somewhere.
13:36
it's not on your phone doing most of the token usage beaming you back the the answer right so if that's the way that these at least right now these early agentic personal products are working does that not make the phone less crucial >> I have to be careful not to disclose
13:54
names but some AI companies right now some of the companies the forefront of AI are telling Qualcomm Qualcomm by 2028 I need to make sure that I have the ability to run at least a 100red billion parameter model into a phone and and I needed to have this thing running kind of all the time. >> So you're saying there's AI companies
14:14
>> So you're saying there's AI companies that are talking about >> well AI companies uh are starting to do phones.
14:20
Look, it's interesting if I just give you an example of the the China uh phones that we just talked about it.
14:25
Uh the DAB phone is a by dense phone uh you know made by uh Nubia >> and uh there's more coming. There's more coming.
14:35
But but I think there's an understanding there's an understanding that the phone is pretty important for agents.
14:40
There's going to be the battle of the agents.
14:43
>> Uh which agent you want to do what?
14:45
That's I said before this is early days on the AI and there's a lot of clarity now that there are things you have to do on the phone.
14:53
>> There are things that you have to do on the phone also supporting other devices.
14:56
I think it's futile to have a conversation about cloud and edge because what happen is more and more things you're going to do on the cloud.
15:05
You're going to find more interesting and sophisticated things that you're going to have to do only on the cloud and you're going to do on the cloud and there are going to things that you're going to have to do on device because you have to do on the device.
15:15
There's a lot of discussions about cloud and edge about one competing or replacing the other. That's incorrect.
15:23
Um, let me give an example now.
15:25
Let's say that we pull up our phones and we're going to say, okay, I have 300 apps organized in folders.
15:33
Let's go one by one and say what is running on the phone and what's running on the device.
15:37
It's almost like doesn't matter.
15:39
But the moment I put a phone that has a lot of processing power, I've been doing that today.
15:43
I know from one chip to the other, there's more processing power.
15:47
If I put it in airplane mode, it become useless.
15:50
We put it in our pocket, we don't use it.
15:52
And I think that's going to be like that with AI.
15:55
There's going to things are going to happen on the phone because they have to happen on the phone.
15:57
The things going to happen on the cloud.
15:59
And I'll finish by saying this comment I made about friction. That's important.
16:03
If you pull up your phone and it takes time for the agent to do things certain things for you, then you're going to do it yourself.
16:14
But certain things you're going to just get uh the agent to do it.
16:20
And the last part is I talk about in my keynote the phone's very unique to you.
16:25
So you may have this little app in the corner that does something maybe open your garage door or or check something and and that app is on your phone and you need the agent to go over there in a phone and operate the app.
16:37
So you're going to have a combination.
16:39
You need to think about those things as one integrated computing system the way the smartphone is today.
16:45
So you don't ascribe to a potential world where Muse and these personal agents had abstracted away the computing off the device and most workloads are token usage is happening in these these cloud VMs.
16:55
No and and there's two reasons. Okay.
16:58
and and there's two reasons. Okay. Um I'm going to first give you I'm going to give you a a reason uh which is there's the coexistence of the old and the new by definition and the coexistence of the old and the new require uh those systems
17:16
to be you know uh leveraging those both words is remember you probably I'm going to show my wage but I remember when everybody talk about the webOS of Palm and all of the applications are going to be cloud basis and that's just going to be the phone's just going to be a shell. It didn't happen that way, right? Uh
17:33
It didn't happen that way, right?
17:33
Uh actually you saw app stores developing.
17:38
Okay, you see now especially with open weight models, you see now the growth of onprem it's very interesting if you look at just if I got this right if you look at the Nvidia last earnings when they talk about in I think was in the Ford guide I don't remember I may get the
17:56
numbers wrong but they talk about 40% of the revenue was AI companies and hyperscalers the other 40 onrem neocloud sovereign AI the moment you believe in onrem you accept hybrid AI, certain things going to do on prem, certain things in the cloud. Then the question
18:12
Then the question is what is the prem? Where does it end? Does it end in your PC? Does end in your phone?
18:17
And I think that's the way this is going to go. >> Okay, I see that.
18:20
I I still am struggling to understand what an AI smartphone is.
18:25
You said that a couple times.
18:26
You said it this morning.
18:26
I mean, you could say these phones are already AI phones.
18:30
They have Siri's kind of good now.
18:33
Google Gemini is very good.
18:33
you know, you can have all the chat bots on there like what is an AI smartphone? What is the difference?
18:39
>> So, the AI smartphone vision became very clear when Open Claw was launched and and the ability for you to tell an agent or the ability for you to text to an agent and say, "Here's what I want you to do for me."
18:52
And that's why I kind of provided the example.
18:54
Um, you're just going to say, you get a question, you're going to say, "Yes."
18:58
And then, and then the phone is the agent is going to do things for you.
19:03
is going to run on that computer.
19:05
It's going to deal with the planning.
19:08
It's going to deal with the smart routing about things they're going to be doing locally.
19:11
It's going to go to your memory personal memory graph in your context.
19:15
Your context only exists in the phone, right?
19:17
Context does not exist in the cloud.
19:19
It doesn't exist in the phone.
19:21
Uh and the sensor data comes from the phone.
19:25
Um so it's going to look into those things.
19:28
is going to make it uh relevant uh to you and going to they take action for you.
19:33
That is very different than uh the things that you can open your browser and do it yourself.
19:40
So it's way beyond a browser.
19:43
I think that's what the AI smartphone is.
19:45
Now it's important to explain we're just at the beginning of this early days of AI and I love making parallels with the smartphone transition. I'll go there.
19:54
But early days of AI, you have some of the phone companies talking about this is the AI.
19:59
So you have the set of features from uh the smartphone maker set of features of the OS.
20:06
So maybe those are the ones that you're going to use it, but that's not AI smartphone.
20:12
Later you saw with orchestrator and agents. This is a 3P issue.
20:16
It's not a first party issue.
20:16
And there's going to be different agents, different skills, different things.
20:23
they're going to be integrated across different companies.
20:25
We use the example of um some services uh like payments.
20:32
The application becomes horizontal and it becomes part of uh everything.
20:34
The boundaries of OS and apps no longer matter and those things those experience happen across multiple devices.
20:41
That that is the fundamental difference. early days of the phone.
20:47
I remember that when the Android launch and uh and iOS the iPhone launch.
20:53
So you have an incumbent uh the time was like Nokia and you also have like BlackBerry and they look at the features that came with the smartphone.
21:02
Let's pick the iPhone as an example. You have iTunes.
21:04
You have the little music app that you can move the drums and the guitar and things around and play music.
21:11
You have those, I don't know, 15 apps that come with the OS.
21:13
not a lot of things in the app store.
21:16
So some of the existing companies Blackberry and Nokia said, "Okay, we can do those features too."
21:22
But that wasn't the smartphone.
21:24
The smartphone was defined by the third party applications.
21:28
Nobody know at that time what is going to be invented and what people are going to do.
21:33
I feel the same way about AI smartphone.
21:35
Once you put the harness in, you put the capability, you will see how those things are going to develop and I think that's going to change the phone experience.
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turning to wearables and I'm old enough to remember when we talked about wearables, we were just talking about VR and then AR a little bit, but now it means a lot of things.
25:08
We're talking about watches, pins, whatever you're working on with Open AI, you can't talk about all these things, right?
25:13
All these devices that are coming.
25:15
I'm curious to hear the state before we go into the AI wearables, the state of VR and AR because Qualcomm's been a player in that industry for a long time.
25:22
And um it feels like that industry has struggled to gain real commercial traction though Meta is starting to have it with the glasses and Google's coming with their glasses with Warby Parker etc.
25:33
I think Apple will come everyone's coming now.
25:38
What do you make of the the wearable market as it exists today and is VR something that you and Qualcomm still believe in or are we kind of past that? >> No.
25:46
This is a good question and I and because there's a lot of things built into that I I will >> I'll start with VR.
25:52
is like a console type market.
25:55
It's like a gaming market.
25:57
So, you should think about that.
25:58
>> That wasn't always the case though.
25:59
People thought it might be like mobile, right? >> I know.
26:01
People talk about this kind of the the future, the metaverse, but and I will I will give you very specifics on those things.
26:08
But if you look the technology develop uh to the point that you actually have a pretty good experience, but it's more like a gaming console experience.
26:17
A lot of the U applications was about gaming, not even social.
26:21
It's about gaming because it's not a device that is convenient for you to walk around, you know, um, every day.
26:29
You're just going to put this thing, you're going to get fully immersed.
26:30
Then you got to the middle of the road, which is mixed reality, right?
26:34
And, uh, which you have the combination of, uh, augmented reality and see-through.
26:42
But then you get to smart glasses.
26:42
And the thing was not about the visualization technology.
26:47
Think that is a platform.
26:49
The inflection point came because of Genai.
26:51
Let's just pick the of those three categories.
26:55
The one that I believe is the one that is going to be very successful.
26:59
It's already successful today.
27:02
I think today the market it is in the 50 to 60 million units shipped.
27:04
I think we have about 40 different designs across different companies.
27:10
But I think that's going to um grow dramatically.
27:15
And let me explain to you what happened and why.
27:17
First, I remember the first uh smart glasses.
27:22
The intent was to extend the camera functionality.
27:25
Take a photo or record a movie posted on Instagram as a story.
27:30
But then Genai happened and then you started to do different things. What is this? Translate this. Take me there, etc. Who's this person?
27:37
and you started to see exactly this the agentic or new AI workloads getting traction this became a more useful device um and what is interesting about that category if you believe that on what we've been saying for a couple years AI is the new UI then this is a prime real estate close to your eyes to your ears in your mouth very natural humans uh know uh how to wear a class.
28:08
There are some rules like that's that's the problems we need to solve.
28:13
The rules is you need to have about 35 g or less.
28:16
I'm giving you the ideal.
28:19
You need to have 6 810 battery life and uh and it needs to be a fashion device >> that is going to get traction.
28:27
I actually believe in all of this category of wearables. All of it.
28:31
of wearables. All of it. The one that I I am the biggest bullish and the will be the biggest category is glasses because of see what I see read what I read in in other things and some interesting use cases like for example our research team did something super simple it's a small
28:50
model in the glass you load up your company directory and then you just walk around and say oh who's this person oh that's Alex here is the employee number so so there's so many different applications and I think that's the one that developed Just to finish the answer, watches will play a role. Pins,
29:04
Pins, pendants, jewelry will play a role.
29:07
So, we have a number of different designs with companies. We see everything now.
29:14
People are experimenting with earbuds with cameras, jewelry, people can wear jewelry, pendants, badges, the thing we announced with Microsoft. So, we'll see.
29:23
It's early, but uh it's promising.
29:26
of all of those, I think the biggest one is smart glasses.
29:33
>> So, let's take the watch out for a second because the watch has other utility, health and fitness and things, too.
29:37
So, if you're saying glasses is going to be one, the smartphone is going to obviously continue to be relevant.
29:43
Would you bet on a third form factor in all these wearables that you guys are seeing?
29:46
You mentioned there's dozens.
29:49
Uh, and big companies are coming with their wearables soon that we haven't seen yet.
29:52
Do you think there's a third form factor that you're like, "Oh, millions and millions of people will use this like a puck that listens to you, a blah blah blah, jewelry, whatever." >> Yes.
30:02
And and the only difficulty in answer to this question is uh what is that form factor?
30:10
People are experimenting with different things and we'll see it.
30:13
It feels like an iPod moment. >> Mhm.
30:17
So, >> I've been thinking about the Walkman too, you know, like and how how it was a cultural moment and >> it feels like that. >> Yeah.
30:25
>> Before the Walkman or before the iPod, if I if I said, "Will would everybody carry a device like that?" You say, "I don't know." And then it happens.
30:32
So, I and it's all about the thing that I said before. Do I trust it?
30:36
And it does have value and it's low friction.
30:39
If people crack that, I think it's going to be successful.
30:43
Let's talk about data centers because I am still trying to wrap my head around why is Qualcomm doing data centers. >> Why not? >> Why not?
30:51
I guess people need them.
30:51
Uh like we need, you know, the world is starved of compute.
30:55
But what is the opportunity for you guys?
30:57
I mean, you're a large company, but you're dealing with the hyperscalers.
31:00
And I guess delineate the difference of the strategy you have versus an Amazon, a GCP, you know, Microsoft, etc. >> We have a mobile DNA. We started in mobile.
31:11
We've been the most concentrated company in mobile.
31:13
Uh we understand that we'll continue to do that.
31:16
And but there was several steps as we started to diversify the company.
31:21
We thought that the technology we had could be relevant and disrupt in other markets and we started to build computing assets and we went started to make the computer bigger. There was a process.
31:33
You cannot burn any step.
31:34
burn any step. you have to go to that process and we went into PCs and cars and it's interesting when you think about car some of their chips they run autonomy uh from both level two++ level three level uh level four and we have the
31:54
silicon running this this is like a server it's a server class processor for you to do those things so so we had to develop the capability >> so it became a natural natural thing for us to expand the next step of the company to go to the data center. That's
32:10
That's the second part of the answer is this data center thing is moving at a breakneck speed and everything that people believe was true it changed really fast and I'll give an example in the very beginning was all about Nvidia GPU and even people when talk about inferencing a new harder for inference the answer was you train on Nvidia GPU when you're not doing training you do inference on Nvidia GPU only Nvidia GPU.
32:44
>> Then inference started again scale.
32:46
People said, "Oh, there's different solutions to do inference. There's more efficient.
32:50
They're more uh better performance, lower TCO."
32:52
And if that wasn't true, Nvidia will have nothing to do with Grock. Okay.
32:57
But now you keep going and you said the compute demand is very high.
33:04
I don't have a lot of energy.
33:06
I need to find a specialized solution.
33:07
So the inference started to break down in prefill and decode and even decode is bring is breaking down.
33:12
So we look at this scenario we say the first pace memory technology is going to change computer technology going to change very pace in our business it doesn't matter when you enter if you have something innovative and disruptive there's room for you.
33:30
So that's the second tier.
33:30
So we said if we can do something unique, we're going to have a market.
33:36
Let's just go focus on doing something unique and then get to the layer number three which is our DNA is building chips assuming there's a battery on the other side. That's our DNA.
33:49
When I look at a data center, this is the amount of compute.
33:53
This is the availability of energy. Yeah.
33:55
>> So we see, oh, we can we can do something here.
33:57
And and that's kind of where we are.
33:59
We focus on can we build energy efficient high performance CPUs, high performance energy efficient accelerators.
34:09
That's our space and uh it's just a natural evolution of Qualcomm.
34:14
>> So it sounds like designing for the battery was a key insight for why you're doing this. >> Yeah.
34:19
Look, it's uh you know, we have this we have this uh conversation all the time about what are the things that make some companies very unique.
34:27
For example, Intel was in the data center before Nvidia was doing CPUs, but Nvidia was doing a lot of parallel processing and you know rendering triangles for graphics.
34:39
Well, that happened the parallel processing was very important for some of the AI processing that creates an opportunity for them, >> right?
34:47
>> Uh we feel when when you have compute versus energy equation that creates opportunity for us.
34:54
>> I was the last person to interview Chris Latner before you acquired his company modular. >> He's a great guy.
34:58
He's a great guy and he's a legend.
34:59
Uh he's invented multiple programming languages including Swift and you bought his company Modular recently.
35:04
And for people who don't know what Modular was doing, it was essentially a bid to crack the software mode that keeps the AI industry tethered to Nvidia and CUDA, the software layer that Nvidia uses.
35:15
that Nvidia uses. and he told me and this was you know several months ago that there's this coming wave of different kinds of chips which you were just talking about that you know CPUs all these things used for AI and developers need a way to use all of them
35:29
and I'm curious how much of that strategy that he had at Modular is now the Qualcomm chip and data center strategy >> you know I met Chris and I you know we're so fortunate to have he and his team in Qualcomm I'm sure he had options to go to very different uh companies if you wanted to. But I think what made
35:47
But I think what made modular and qual fit is kind of we share uh we we had we share the same vision about what is happening with the industry.
36:01
First of all, a company like Qualcomm look when we invented some of the most incredible technology in the world, we license for everybody, right?
36:10
So, so a company like Qualcomm, we believe that you gain uh a lot more innovation and scale if the technology is widely uh deployed and you have more companies contributing to the innovation.
36:20
Today, you do have a control point uh on the software side and there is an industry need to have an open alternative to run AI because AI is not going to be unique to the data center.
36:33
It's going to go everywhere.
36:33
You talk today about a multitude of harder in the data center.
36:37
data center. Think about the multitude the harder when you put cars and PCs and phones and wearables all of this developers need to target all of this compute to run models big and small and they needed to have a common platform and it doesn't exist in AI what has been
36:53
mature in in traditional data centers like Linux as an OX as an example um or even if you go to the cloud think about the Google Kubernetes or even in our space when you think about the the horizontal phone space is Android is an open platform. Those things don't exist
37:08
Those things don't exist for AI.
37:10
So the vision was modular.
37:10
Chris and the modular team was thinking we need to develop this. Developers need this. The industry need this.
37:20
We're going to develop it's a modern it's have higher performance and runs on any hardware.
37:25
And I said okay let's do this at Qualcomm and let's offer to everybody.
37:30
And to the point that we at Qualcomm will celebrate we will celebrate every single modular deployment on Nvidia on AMD on on Broadcom on any other chip on Intel because we actually believe the industry will benefit from a standard common open platform.
37:49
We said we're going to do Apache 2. 0 license.
37:50
It's going to be open source.
37:52
What it means to the Qualcomm chips once the platform is open we can't compete on harder.
37:57
That's what we done our whole life.
37:59
That's that's our mobile business.
38:01
That's uh that's everything that we do.
38:02
So we're not afraid >> compete on the merits of the hardware versus >> we compete on the mer the harder that's going to allow harder innovation.
38:08
If you have a closed system I may have a harder innovation but can nobody will ever be able to use it.
38:14
So so for us since we're new to the data center we entering the space then we're we're happy because it will create an opportunity to compete on the hardware.
38:24
The other part of the equation is the conversation we had before about AI, smartphones and PCs and cars.
38:30
The edge is going to be part of this compute continuum when uh everything is going to be running AI and uh and you have the same problem.
38:39
We need the platform that scales.
38:41
So we're going to be like I said doing everything possible to make sure that every hardware company can use it.
38:48
Uh modular is going to be agnostic.
38:51
Modular is like, you know, it's going to be run as as a Qualcomm company and we're just going to be supporting modeling their chips and trying to build great hardware.
39:01
>> Let's end on something that I am also trying to figure out which is 6G.
39:04
So, uh I've covered multiple G's.
39:07
Uh you mentioned 1G earlier in this conversation. 6G is coming.
39:11
I think most people would probably struggle to explain what 5G changed for them.
39:15
Um and the carriers were hyping it up like crazy. I mean, this is every G.
39:20
This is it's a major hype train that is associated with these coming waves.
39:24
What practically do you think that 6G is going to unlock? It's not possible today.
39:32
>> But because of what you said, I feel compelled to give you the 5G answer first because I'm not going to say people are are people are just taking for granted there will so I'll tell you the two things from a consumer standpoint that came with 5G.
39:45
First of all, nobody will have unlimited data rates on a smartphone if it wasn't for 5G.
39:54
Economically, not viable to do it for 4 years. Not viable.
39:57
So, the fact that people can have unlimited data rates on a phone is 5G.
40:01
Uh, so if anything that changed their lives is they have unlimited data rates right now, but that's not the only one.
40:07
4G, for example, was the beginning of the smartphone.
40:11
You got broadband and the phone became a computer.
40:13
But at that point in time you saw the disappearance of CDs.
40:18
Everybody starts streaming music.
40:20
You have enough bandwidth uh to stream music. CDs gone but not DVDs.
40:28
With 5G DVDs are gone because now you have enough ability to stream music.
40:30
So 5G the second thing you give to consumers is high definition video download.
40:38
That's important for me to tell about 6G.
40:39
So now let me answer your question.
40:42
Every even number G is super successful. 2G super successful. 4G is super successful.
40:49
So based on that tradition, 6G is going to be super successful. Okay?
40:53
>> Now, >> we talk about this, but there's a reason, right?
40:56
So you have a major disruption in technology and then you get to go fix things, right?
41:00
So let's go that in memory lane.
41:04
Phones started with 1G analog walkie type phones.
41:06
um though people realize this is incredible.
41:10
You can carry a phone with you but there's not enough spectrum for everybody to use it.
41:16
We needed to bring digital seller and digital seller 2G was about can everybody on earth have a telephone super successful you saw the explosion of mobile everybody having a telephone postpaid prepaid then 3G you did some incremental things you connected to the internet you started to see the blackberries and the remember the Windows 3.
41:38
1s the blackjack and all of those kind of phones then 4G was about broadband big disruption if I have broadband on the other The broadband is a computer. It's not a phone.
41:47
The phone become a computer. Change the world. Smartphone revolution. You saw what happened. 5G, you fix some things.
41:55
Unlimited data rates, high definition video. So now we got to 6G. What is 6G?
42:00
So 6G has been designed for this future that we just talked about in the beginning of the conversation of AI.
42:04
So if I give you like a a simple consumer uh feature answer of 6G is high definition video upstream no matter where you are into the coverage area. Why is that? Think about glasses. See what I see.
42:23
So 6G will transform all of us into walking cameras on this world.
42:30
So you have the ability to each and every one of us to upstream all the time highdeition video if you want to and for see what I see there's going to be very important context >> models to in a privacy conscious way just be observing constantly for you on your behalf
42:46
>> you annotate every image and then um and also when you think about word models and robots and there's a whole bunch of things I'm just giving you from a feature standpoint >> but the big change with 6G is 6G is primarily a data center uh in physical AI network. So you are now going to look
43:02
So you are now going to look at the radio uh signals electric magnetic waves that goes from the base station to your phone and you're going to look at that signal and how it performs and what you get back is an physical AI.
43:16
back is an physical AI. So another feature of 6G when the cell tower sends a radio signal to your phone and vice versa inside that single radio signal and there's billions of connections happen all the time there is a payload that's the data they are transferring but now the signal in itself I can treat as a radar like radars that we put in
43:43
cars for autonomous driving and now I have billions of those radars and What I can do with this I can do a realtime mapping of the world everything in the network uh you know what's happening for example uh in this days become very popular drone detection everything that flies the entire management of the
44:08
aerial economy is going to be uh driven by 6G networks they're going to be sensing everything uh around it everything that moves every car every pedestrian every you can track things those are massive amount of data in context you know for models especially when you think about physical AI and robots and all that so 6G is a very
44:29
disruptive technology it changes the nature of the infrastructure and also allow computer to be distributed so they the 6G infrastructure can also carry tokens uh we build a network they used to be copper and and we have a voice we call each other then it became megabits and is going to have tokens in the middle of this. That's with 6G. But the That's with 6G.
44:50
But the easier way to think about it is going to be the technology that will enable those new classes of agent devices and we'll provide real-time sensing data uh for you know uh AI hyperscalers models and everything that it has to do with uh uh agent experiences.
45:11
>> And when do people feel this in their everyday lives?
45:13
Is it 1 year, 18 months, 2 years, 3 years?
45:15
We're going to do demonstrations at the LA Olympic in 28. Our four silicon.
45:19
Uh it's uh you should be thinking about probably Snapdragon 728 we or 29 one of the two.
45:25
I don't wanted to give the exact date.
45:29
We're going to be showing between prototypes and silicon 202930 early deployments and we'll get scale you know following 2030.
45:40
>> All right Cristiano thank you so much. >> Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.
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