Qualcomm Inc (QCOM)

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Qualcomm (QCOM) unveils new PC laptop chip with AI features for 2024
By: Investing | October 24, 2023

(Reuters) - Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) on Tuesday gave details about a chip for Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows-based laptops that it claims will be faster at some tasks than Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)'s chips for Mac computers.

Qualcomm executives said that the company's new Snapdragon Elite X chip will be available in laptops starting next year and has been redesigned to better handle artificial intelligence tasks like summarizing emails, writing text and generating images.

The announcement comes a day after Reuters reported that Microsoft has encouraged Qualcomm, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) to come up with new chips to handle a bevy of new AI features in Windows, the world's most popular PC operating system.

Qualcomm will be the first to market with a chip to challenge Apple, whose laptop and desktop computers have more than doubled their market share since the iPhone maker introduced custom-designed chips in 2020. The X Elite chip will be the San Diego, California firm's first to feature completely custom computing cores designed by a team of ex-Apple engineers it acquired for $1.4 billion in 2021.

Qualcomm claimed on Tuesday that the X Elite is faster than Apple's M2 Max chip at some tasks and more energy efficient than both Apple and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) PC chips. But Qualcomm Senior Vice President Alex Katouzian said the biggest new feature is that the chip can handle artificial intelligence models with 13 billion parameters, a proxy measure of sophisticated for AI systems that generate text or images.

"These models can respond faster than what you and I can read," Katouzian said. "No one else in the world can do that" on a laptop, Katouzian added.

Francis Sideco, an analyst with TIRIAS Research, said that with companies such as Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) rolling out the ability to use AI to generate images for everything from real estate brochures to beer can labels, demand for laptops with AI capabilities will rise.

"You've got a lot of smaller businesses and individual designers and creators using these devices. They need that kind of capability," Sideco said.

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