It is hard to remember, but once upon a time, Qualcomm was a software powerhouse. They had a mobile operating system (OS), they held developer conferences and had evangelists for their offerings. Over the years, the market shifted, their software team turned inwards for valid reasons, and the company’s developer outreach muscle atrophied. But there are now signs that they are regaining that ability. And this will matter a lot as the company launches its AI PC’s, and other parts of their markets possibly turn in their direction.
A few years ago (long enough that we cannot find the post), we pointed out that Qualcomm did best when it was competing in controlled software environments. The mobile standards are at heart software, byzantine and opaque but still algorithms, and this is a place Qualcomm did well. Similarly, the market for automotive software is going to be tightly controlled by the auto makers, and this also favors Qualcomm. The company knows how to court that kind of developer. By contrast, mobile software is completely freewheeling – the long tail of mobile apps. And trapped behind Apple’s walled garden and whatever it is that Google is doing with Android, there was little point in Qualcomm courting those developers.
This dynamic now looks set to change for two reasons.
The first is PCs. Qualcomm is pushing its Arm-based CPUs, and in this market software developers matter a lot. Qualcomm needs to ensure that the software experience on their PCs is comparable to that on x86 PCs.
In our most recent newsletter (`which you can sign up for here) we linked to a number of recent stories about a range of software titles that were ready to run native on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite – including a list of games and Google’s Chrome browser. With those devices set to hit the market in coming months, these are exactly the kinds of headlines Qualcomm needs. The company faces a steep consumer education wall, consumers will know that they need to ask about software compatibility and performance. There are going to be a lot more stories comparing performance of every conceivable PC application running on Qualcomm against the same applications running on Intel and AMD. Our sense is that the x86 camp is not terribly worried about Qualcomm at this point, but they have a long history of fighting this out in the press. The irony is, if we start to see a whole bunch of very similar press stories painting Qualcomm-based PCs in a poor light that means their competitors are actually concerned. Beyond the FUD, Qualcomm seems to have ironed out a lot of the problems inherent in launching a whole new PC CPU architecture. It has been months since we have seen any negative commentary in the broad developer blogosphere. So Qualcomm seems to have done a good job of ironing out the kinks and more importantly also communicating that to developers.
The other reason that Qualcomm needs to start caring about developers is AI. AI looks likely to be a much focus on their PC’s. From what we can tell, Snapdragon has the most performant neural engine of any of the PC CPUs coming to market this year. That is an impressive achievement, albeit one dependent on Microsoft giving buyers a reason to care about that performance.
Beyond product launches, the advent of AI has the potential to shake up the broader software market. While we think most of the gains of “AI” to date have accrued as features in traditional software, we are still in very early days of AI. When (if?) we start to see broader, more generalized AI applications emerge, Qualcomm will find itself arguably as the leader in AI Edge Inference. Maybe AI fizzles out and nothing much changes, but there is definitely the possibility that AI becomes very important to consumers, which means developers will want their software to run on that best-in-class edge silicon which means Qualcomm. We have long held that the only way broad-based AI adoption works is to have most inference run on the edge, and Qualcomm’s edge offerings have material power and performance advantages. This applies as much to mobiles as it does to PCs. All of that could spark a virtuous cycle across Qualcomm’s end markets.
All of that remains a future possibility, but it is good to see Qualcomm upping its developer outreach. The company now has a large team working on software problems. Currently, much of their work is focused on ironing out all those problems inherent in launching PCs, but that is not all they are working on.
In February they rolled out their “AI Hub”. We touched on this then, but did not do it justice. This can be seen as a marketplace, or clearing house of AI models, pre-tuned to run on Qualcomm silicon. This is analogous to much of what Nvidia has been building for the cloud. And while Qualcomm’s AI Hub is behind Nvidia, that is not the right benchmark. Nvidia is focused on the AI in the cloud, but Qualcomm is competing for the edge, and none of their peers have done anywhere near as much work as they have in getting AI software running on silicon.
Of course there are a lot of things that need to go right for all of this to materialize. Arm-based PCs face a stiff uphill battle. And AI remains a giant question mark. But it is encouraging to see Qualcomm getting itself back in shape. They are going to need a healthy dose of luck, but fortune favors the prepared.
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