There is no better way to explain the pace of change in computing than to draw parallels between Aesop’s hare and tortoise fable and the two popular computing devices: the smartphone and the PC.
In just over a decade, the humble phone has morphed into a mini-computer while the PC languished. Smartphones have surpassed their older PC siblings in terms of speed, power and, in some cases, storage capacity. Cell phones have become ubiquitous, and the microprocessors that power them have become increasingly sophisticated.
Qualcomm has dominated the smartphone chipset market. And until Apple entered the scene to make its own system chip (SoC), Qualcomm was the leading chipmaker for mobile computing. The company’s Snapdragon processors have continually improved the performance and performance of smartphones over the years. Now the San Diego, California-based company is looking to spice up the PC.
Kedar KondapSVP and GM, Compute and Gaming at Qualcomm Technologies spoke The HindusJohn Xavier on the convergence of phones and PCs, the era of GPUs, the importance of milliseconds in gaming, 5G and the competition in chipmaking for PCs.
Edited excerpts:
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Can you explain your role as Qualcomm’s leader of computing?
Kedar Kondap: I’ve been in mobile product management for over a decade, and about a year ago I stepped into that role to lead data processing. This is a very important market; We want to expand beyond mobile. I’ve been with Intel for seven years before joining Qualcomm, so I’m familiar with the PC market in general. There’s a lot of convergence we want to push between a phone and a PC. So we firmly believe that a lot of innovation is needed in a PC. In the last 10 years there have been so many innovations in smartphones, from the display to the camera. We want to bring some of that experience to the PC, which has seen very limited innovation in recent years. So our goal is to drive the convergence of phones and PCs.
Want to replicate what’s happening in the handset on a PC? Or are you considering an entirely new paradigm?
CC: We think about this in the context of user experiences. We want to bring the same user experiences from a phone to a PC. Over the years, most smartphone customers’ experiences have become seamless, from booking a taxi to GPS-based navigation. Triangulate multiple GPS satellites to send the best possible GPS signal to the phone. Sensors for tracking running and walking have also become efficient. This has reduced the drain on the battery. All of this has happened because a lot of intelligence has been put into the smartphone. It understands when a person is actively using their phone in certain areas. These are some user experiences that we focus on. When we drive an architecture, we drive it with a power-first approach. Even today, if you ask a consumer what matters most – whether it’s a PC or a phone – they’ll tell you it’s battery life. You want the best battery life. So we’re focusing on those experiences that just don’t exist in a PC today. We want to change.
We are now in the GPU age as graphics computing plays a big role. How do you deal with these times? And what do you see as the next big thing in computing?
CC: In the last 10 years, the GPU has changed the way many things have been used in a phone or even a PC, with a better user interface with denser layers on the smartphone. Ray tracing is now starting to come in phones. You get better shadows and rendering. We believe there will be a third and important metric in the next 10 years, and that is AI. This is complemented by networked intelligent edge technology. This means that much of the processing will take place on the PC. We want to ensure that applications can take advantage of running on Snapdragon and they take advantage of the heterogeneous architecture we are bringing to PCs.
If you look at the Qualcomm architecture in phones today, you have a CPU and a GPU. In addition, we have AI, a neural processing unit that is powerful in terms of the number of networks it runs and the number of different objects it can recognize. Then you have a dedicated video and audio core. And then dedicated sensors and security features are tightly integrated. So, for example, if you’re running a video call, we want to be able to run dedicated aspects of the video call to take advantage of the architecture, such as: B. Linking your camera to Face Unlock via a secure pipeline through our SoC. These are things we want to bring from phone to PC.
If you look at the Qualcomm architecture in phones today, you have a CPU and a GPU. In addition, we have an AI neural processing unit that is strong in terms of the number of networks it runs and the number of different objects it can detect. Then you have a dedicated video and audio core. And then dedicated sensors and security features are tightly integrated. So, for example, if you’re running a video call, we want to be able to run dedicated aspects of the video call to take advantage of the architecture, such as: B. Linking your camera to Face Unlock via a secure pipeline through our SoC. These are things we want to bring from phone to PC.
How do you plan this convergence?
CC: Our first step is to ensure that all apps running on smartphones today run seamlessly on Snapdragon. Second, they use the architecture that we have. Then they will go beyond that and use our AI for the calculation.
Intel, AMD and NVIDIA are also vying for PC market share. How do you see the competition in this area?
CC: We recognize that there is an incumbent, but at the same time there is room for innovation in PCs. It just hasn’t happened in the last few years. So as soon as you start getting app developers to create applications, porting begins. For this reason, together with Microsoft, we announced the Windows development kit Volterra. We’re passing it along to several developers because as soon as they start using this architecture, things will be ported to Snapdragon. And consumers will see a massive difference.
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How do you plan to ride the 5G wave?
CC: There are many use cases. 4G solved the bandwidth latency that has allowed us to stream movies to our smartphones so easily. Now with 5G it will expand even more. We work with many developers on latency reduction. I think that’s an angle where we’re going to bring multiple use cases to PCs.
Can you give us your perspective on the gaming market? How are things developing?
CC: If you look at the phone as a category, we have Snapdragon Elite Gaming. And the reason we’ve separated Elite Gaming from the rest is because there are several features that we’ve particularly built in, such as visual fidelity). There are so many things that we have already done in this area. Especially in eSports leagues, a millisecond delay decides whether you win or lose in this segment. So we spent a lot of time reducing latency, understanding players’ WiFi network, and figuring out how the player is doing within that network with static IP. All of these things drive differentiation at Elite Gaming.
