They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.
Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
- iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G
- 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI
- Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson.
- IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems
> They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips.
As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market?
(The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is based on a Cortex A53. One would think if they're serious about RISC-V they would start with this kind of things, as in low-end stuff for tinkerers.)
>They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm
did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know.
not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L.
all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all. ARM is in NVidia accelerators, in Apple phones, in things of actual relevance.
Where is qcom "in"? theyre competing in... laptops!? i could not think of a worse commodity to be in. low volume, no margins, no added value. NPUs? holy snakeoil. again, this edge inferencing that nobody cares about. theres not even a roadmap for anyone to care about it.
>next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
yeah, a market of what, $50M? jeez louise.
>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over valued in the market right now. The other issues are much more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also compete at lower tier where MediaTek has been very successful
The honest answer is that they see AI interaction as being the next human to computer interface, one that will function much in the way that super-apps do today, with the benefit of accelerating the purchasing pathway.
In a way this mirrors how people opt for using apps even though a web version exists, because the apps are generally more performant.
I'd argue that ChatGPT is already there. The instant check out feature they've added, along with integrations was that crucial link between recommending and fulfilling a purchase. It turns ChatGPT into something that can very directly assist with typical "life stuff".
As examples: You're having a dinner party, it can set the menu, then buy the ingredients. At christmas, spend a few minutes talking about your kids and then it can make christmas gift suggestions and go and buy it for you, then do it again 12 months later.
Getting between the consumer and their purchases would be highly lucrative, it functionally replaces one of the core functions of advertising and retail.
"With the money they earn, they can buy more police and political power. Then they come after us. We have the unions and gambling, and they're the best things to have, but narcotics is the thing of the future. If we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. Not now, but in ten years".
Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.
The gap between Google’s and Apple’s SoCs is insane. Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current iPhones do.
Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.
google is competing with a different offering. with a pixel you get google's ecosystem. apple is also not neccesarily top dog in performance (maybe they are - havne't checked lately), nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the audience seriously cares about.
for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability concerning pricing and budgeting. its a smart long term move, and i think the industry is going to continue to push towards consolidation and in-housing.
Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.
Yeah, there are only a small handful of companies making radios for mobile networks that I am aware of - its really hard. Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, Apple?
I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.
If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot.
But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?
I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.
Qualcomm still are the only relevant ones in town who actually sell high performance ARM designs to third parties and have no political quarrels attached, there's a lot of money to be made in that game.
As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of demand.
Cooked how exactly?
- Completely missed out on the LLM boom, just like everyone except nvidia.
- Apple never used qcom SoCs, just their modems, Google doesn't even register on the radar of sales, their first foray into SoCs isn't great.
- Idk where you get that, they still hold the entire market in their firm grasp and Nuvia stuff has been nothing but outstanding, it's just a shame that MS are cowards and dropped the Windows-on-Arm stuff again.
- Google are partnering with them for the Android on PC projects.
I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC grade chips.
Cooked hardware companies get bought into it seems. Intel is the most egregious example, but AMD is being circled by OpenAI now for 10%. Companies like Marvell and even hard drive companies are up due to how they fit into the AI pipeline.
But intel being "cooked" was a massive psyop. how was intel ever "cooked", when they were still designing, taping out, and delivering massive quantities of CPUs to DCs and consumer products?
AMD briefly gave them a run for their money, but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that bulldozer was, where the company basically needed rescuing. For a brief moment, they weren't a monopolist - that's all that happened, right?
AMD being circled by OpenAI makes sense since AMD makes NVidia knockoffs. that's objectively useful. Harddrive company make sense for storing weights and generative content. Marvell is networking...
what does QCOm present here, that openai or the AI scene at large needs? the only bet is robotics - but why on earth would I put some washed-up adreno into a 40kg man-sized apparatus which would very comfortably fit a H100?
I don't think OpenAI has any plans to buy AMD. That's just another moving paper around and we all get rich in the AI space - like the nVidia, OpenAI, Oracle circle of funding.
You should feel dread. They're a pretty awful company... one of those outfits that seems to employ more lawyers than engineers. Basically the Oracle of chips.
I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the next decade?
- completely missed out on AI
- phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google
- squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc)
they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.
They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.
Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm - iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G - 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI - Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson. - IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems
> They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips.
As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market?
(The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is based on a Cortex A53. One would think if they're serious about RISC-V they would start with this kind of things, as in low-end stuff for tinkerers.)
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> If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
They have to fix their approach to Linux driver development. (and driver development in general).
Qualcomm likes to lob hardware to consumers while spending the minimal amount of time making sure the drivers to support that hardware actually works.
I couldn't imagine someone like Valve leaping at the opportunity to use them.
>They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm
did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know.
not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L.
all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all. ARM is in NVidia accelerators, in Apple phones, in things of actual relevance.
Where is qcom "in"? theyre competing in... laptops!? i could not think of a worse commodity to be in. low volume, no margins, no added value. NPUs? holy snakeoil. again, this edge inferencing that nobody cares about. theres not even a roadmap for anyone to care about it.
>next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
yeah, a market of what, $50M? jeez louise.
>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
seems to be the only thing going for it.
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I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over valued in the market right now. The other issues are much more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also compete at lower tier where MediaTek has been very successful
The honest answer is that they see AI interaction as being the next human to computer interface, one that will function much in the way that super-apps do today, with the benefit of accelerating the purchasing pathway.
In a way this mirrors how people opt for using apps even though a web version exists, because the apps are generally more performant.
I'd argue that ChatGPT is already there. The instant check out feature they've added, along with integrations was that crucial link between recommending and fulfilling a purchase. It turns ChatGPT into something that can very directly assist with typical "life stuff".
As examples: You're having a dinner party, it can set the menu, then buy the ingredients. At christmas, spend a few minutes talking about your kids and then it can make christmas gift suggestions and go and buy it for you, then do it again 12 months later.
Getting between the consumer and their purchases would be highly lucrative, it functionally replaces one of the core functions of advertising and retail.
2 replies →
"With the money they earn, they can buy more police and political power. Then they come after us. We have the unions and gambling, and they're the best things to have, but narcotics is the thing of the future. If we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. Not now, but in ten years".
-- Tom Hagen
Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.
The gap between Google’s and Apple’s SoCs is insane. Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current iPhones do.
Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.
10 replies →
google is competing with a different offering. with a pixel you get google's ecosystem. apple is also not neccesarily top dog in performance (maybe they are - havne't checked lately), nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the audience seriously cares about.
for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability concerning pricing and budgeting. its a smart long term move, and i think the industry is going to continue to push towards consolidation and in-housing.
4 replies →
Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.
So they're basically going to become a patent troll, like IBM?
2 replies →
Qualcomm are good at radios and associated signal processing. The rest is simply integrations around that.
Yeah, there are only a small handful of companies making radios for mobile networks that I am aware of - its really hard. Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, Apple?
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Buying random companies they have no use for like Arduino, they have firmly entered the Intel era.
I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.
If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot.
But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?
I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.
3 replies →
Qualcomm still are the only relevant ones in town who actually sell high performance ARM designs to third parties and have no political quarrels attached, there's a lot of money to be made in that game.
As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of demand.
Cooked how exactly? - Completely missed out on the LLM boom, just like everyone except nvidia. - Apple never used qcom SoCs, just their modems, Google doesn't even register on the radar of sales, their first foray into SoCs isn't great. - Idk where you get that, they still hold the entire market in their firm grasp and Nuvia stuff has been nothing but outstanding, it's just a shame that MS are cowards and dropped the Windows-on-Arm stuff again. - Google are partnering with them for the Android on PC projects.
I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC grade chips.
Cooked hardware companies get bought into it seems. Intel is the most egregious example, but AMD is being circled by OpenAI now for 10%. Companies like Marvell and even hard drive companies are up due to how they fit into the AI pipeline.
But intel being "cooked" was a massive psyop. how was intel ever "cooked", when they were still designing, taping out, and delivering massive quantities of CPUs to DCs and consumer products?
AMD briefly gave them a run for their money, but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that bulldozer was, where the company basically needed rescuing. For a brief moment, they weren't a monopolist - that's all that happened, right?
AMD being circled by OpenAI makes sense since AMD makes NVidia knockoffs. that's objectively useful. Harddrive company make sense for storing weights and generative content. Marvell is networking...
what does QCOm present here, that openai or the AI scene at large needs? the only bet is robotics - but why on earth would I put some washed-up adreno into a 40kg man-sized apparatus which would very comfortably fit a H100?
1 reply →
I don't think OpenAI has any plans to buy AMD. That's just another moving paper around and we all get rich in the AI space - like the nVidia, OpenAI, Oracle circle of funding.
just a correction: Mediatek is Taiwanese.
[flagged]
You should feel dread. They're a pretty awful company... one of those outfits that seems to employ more lawyers than engineers. Basically the Oracle of chips.
I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
Yeah, it might as well say “Oracle to acquire $FOO”
Could be worse. Could be Broadcom.
If you want to use SOTA camera sensors on an embedded system Qualcomm is great (in particular compared to NVIDA Jetson).
"Broadcom to acquire Qualcomm"
Better? :)
Would that be BroadQual? ComComm? QualBroad?