Qualcomm: A New Force in Cloud AI

by | Dec 28, 2020 | DataCenter AI, Research Paper

Qualcomm announced the first shipments of the Cloud AI 100 family of products, thus entering the data center, cloud edge, edge appliance and 5G infrastructure markets for accelerated artificial intelligence (AI) processing. Qualcomm has demonstrated its AI and power-efficiency capabilities for many years with the Snapdragon family of SoCs for mobile, networking and embedded markets. The company has now scaled up this technology to compete with NVIDIA, Intel, Xilinx, Amazon Web Services and scores of well-funded startups entering the current Cambrian Explosion of rapid advancements in AI technology. Like that geologic event – in which we find the sudden appearance and rapid diversification of almost all animal phyla emerging in the fossil record – in terms of the AI timeline, it will be interesting to see which solutions thrive and continue and which fall by the wayside as the technological evolution continues.

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Table Of Contents:

  • Summary
  • The Qualcomm Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy For Entering The Cloud
  • The Cloud AI 100 Family Of AI SoCs And Cards
  • Performance, Latency And Efficiency Comparisons
  • Qualcomm’s AI Software Stack
  • Competitive Landscape
  • Overall Assessment And Conclusions
  • Figure 1: Qualcomm Serviceable Market (SAM) Estimates
  • Figure 2: Qualcomm’s Vision For Distributed Intelligence
  • Figure 3: The Cloud AI 100 Block Diagram
  • Figure 4: The Cloud AI 100 Edge Development Kit
  • Figure 5: Qualcomm Initial Benchmarks For Image Recognition
  • Figure 6: Cloud AI 100 Power Efficiency
  • Figure 7: The Software Development Stack For The Cloud AI 100

Companies Cited:

  • Alibaba
  • Amazon
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Baidu
  • Blaize
  • Facebook
  • Flex Logix
  • Google
  • Groq
  • Gyrfalcon
  • Huawei
  • Intel
  • Microsoft
  • NVIDIA
  • Qualcomm
  • SambaNova
  • Tencent
  • Tenstorrent
  • Xilinx