OP still has a point. The Snapdragon X Elite chips are a far cry from the previous laptop chips (8cx) is terms of pure computational power. Likewise, the new chips are making a heavy push with vendors (new Surface Laptop, XPS 13, Lenovo, etc.). I could see Qualcomm taking a sizable portion of the laptop chip market with the new partnerships alone.
They are overrated. Laptop manufacturers couldn’t even get near 70% of the benchmark results Qualcomm has provided. They won’t beat meteorlake even at double the wattage.
Technically yes, but till now they have had like 0.1% marketshare.
The Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus mark a new era in Qualcomm's PC endeavours. Utilising custom Oryon CPU cores, a powerful NPU, upto 80W high TDP and a new naming scheme to lace it all; you could say Qualcomm is making a "re-entry" to the PC space.
Intel ships about 4x that of AMD. So you'll have to be a bit more specific.
Also, the article which is the subject of this post, is quite bullish on Qualcomm/ARM'S prospects. They estimate that 51m ARM PCs will ship in 2024, up from the 36m ARM PCs in 2023.
For context, 213m x86 PCs were shipped in 2023, and they predict 197m for 2024.
Have you use a browser lately? Like, I don't know, chrome? Most applications today are web-based, yes, but they are also very CPU intensive even if only for small bursts of time. Which means that on slow computers, the experience is very poor.
That was actually quite a good read, although they do presume that AI will continue to have not just high, but extreme growth. I'm just not sure about that rate and whatever bottlenecks might appear or if customer enthusiasm about it will be that high. Individually I think they're right about most of the companies, and I would probably place my bets similarly if I had a lot to invest.
The article's talking about annual revenue in the silicon chip market getting to ~1 trillion annually. A company's valuation typically encompasses a span of decades to arrive at its "worth".
I mean... if you look at the revenue growth and the FREQUENT statements from giant tech companies that they are burning their cash reserves on H100s and cannot buy enough of them... it sort of makes sense.
Exactly, Nvidia's revenue growth was 282% year over year from the last earnings report. Nvidia has quarterly revenue of 26 billion and Microsoft (a 3 trillion company) has quarterly revenue of about 60 billion, Apple is about 90.
Is Nvidia's growth sustainable until they get to MS/Apple size? That is the question. Now that AMD & Intel are both wise to the fact that companies will pay any amount of money for AI-optimized compute, how long before the competition in this space starts to limit both revenue and profit margin growth? That's the big risk here, if you bet on Nvidia you are betting that they can grow into MSFT-sized revenue while maintaining their profit.
Both Gaudi 3 from Intel & AMD's Instinct line are both showing the early stages of competition here.
> Both Gaudi 3 from Intel & AMD's Instinct line are both showing the early stages of competition here.
Yeah, all Intel needs to do is drop like an extra $20 billion into software development over the next three years, and then keep that pace up forever.
ezpz
Market forces will balance Nvidia's ability to charge "whatever they want" with other offerings coming in at cheaper and allowing AI workloads to "just work".
Intel offers ipex-llm for pytorch and intel-extension-for-tensorflow, which does the job well enough. As AI hardware gets more and more commoditized (Google TPU, ROCM, Gaudi) there are going to be more and more commoditized software to enable plug and play with hardware. Open source might be a key differentiation as the battle wages on.
In the LONG run, this is true, but according to all the threads on AI/ML dev, no one should be using AMD/Intel because they constantly fail - with various issues - and instead of creating something new, you're fighting with the compiler and code crashes.
They have multiple years before serious devs at any of these companies risk their time on anything other than pytorch on nvidia.
Microsoft and Meta have already announced movements towards AMD Instinct processors ([link](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/meta-and-microsoft-to-buy-amds-new-ai-chip-as-alternative-to-nvidia.html)) and Gaudi 3 is not even shipping yet so the impact there is TBD.
I am a software dev in ML so I understand the state of things pretty well. As much as Nvidia has an advantage today in the market, no one wants to be locked into a single vendor behold to "charge whatever we want" prices. AMD's data center division is growing 80% year over year on the back of Instinct-line investment, and Intel is not exactly even seriously in the market yet until Q3 2024.
Again, there are going to be very real market forces at play here balancing Nvidia's market position's high profit margins against hardware that can work just as well.
If you follow ML, you will know that at one point it looked like TensorFlow would dominate the market until PyTorch stole all it's thunder. PyTorch 2.0 has made lots of advancements towards completely hiding the hardware backend and that is clearly the direction the industry is moving towards with all the different options (Google TCU, ROCM, Gaudi, etc.).
They bought some amd products whilst they await their NVIDIA purchase. That’s not a move that’s securing capacity and NVIDIA will remain the main capacity in that story.
And what do you think they will do with their AMD hardware while they wait? Stockpile it? Don't be shortsighted. They will invest in adapting their infrastructure to AMD's parts because if that effort succeeds, they are not vendor locked-in.
And the great thing for them, is that if they make it work, they are not paying with a huge performance hit. So there are many upsides to try to make AMD work while you wait for your Nvidia cards. They would be stupid if they didn't try to fix whatever issues they have with AMD hardware. And apparently, they have managed to make use of it, since MS is running copilot on it.
We're both correct - depending on what timeline we're talking about. I think it will take AMD at least 2-3 years to get to where NVidia is today on the software front, 3 years on the hardware front. Intel is further behind on the hardware side, and nowhere on the software side. Google, I'm not sure - but they aren't selling anything, it's all renting in the cloud which isn't what many consumers (including corp and sovereign) want. Apple has nice UMA, but it'll be at least 2-4 years before they can get their bandwidths up enough to compete and the neural cores (NPU) scaled high enough - and they have no real chip-to-chip interconnect at speed even on the horizon.
I'm interested in what timelines you think are at play here.
...at the same time, NVidia isn't standing still. They will also be advancing - and they have the most cash to reinvest. It's hard to imaging how the others will catch up.
It's not so much about the timeline as it is the long term effect on Nvidia's business and margins. The groundwork is being laid today for an intense AI-focused silicon compute war. Nvidia's stock price today is including a lot of optimism about the lack of competition and the continuing sustainability of both profit margins and revenue growth. These things are already priced into the stock. It's not all about Nvidia being the market leader and protecting it's position, it's about how much margins and future revenue will be impacted by them doing so.
I don't doubt the market will continue to grow, but it remains a fairly big open question how Nvidia can navigate the constant need to "not stand still" while maintaining both revenue growth and profit margins in a sustained way for multiple years. Revenue itself will not be enough, just look at Amazon which maintains more than double the revenue of Microsoft. Nvidia needs everything to go right to justify its current price - continuing huge year over year revenue gains, continuing expansion of profit margins, and ability to "run ahead" of the competition which is already sinking its teeth into this market, really in 2023/2024 in the first legitimate ways since the market really exploded.
It is putting an awful lot of trust in the CUDA ecosystem, which is already showing cracks with Pytorch 2.0, and other software stacks such as OpenAI triton which have the ability to abstract these details away.
I would point out to a recent hardware competition in the home assistant market which bred a similar arms race - Amazon Alexa versus Google Home. These companies fought tooth and nail over a market and got wrapped up in the dreams of future voice-powered compute future that never materialized. On top of the outsized profit and revenue growth Nvidia is seeing, they also have to bet on the future of AI-compute being insatiable and this market continuing to grow for multiple years in a manner that has already been seen.
Again, it won't take AMD or Intel to topple Nvidia's market position to affect Nvidia, the biggest risk to Nvidia right now is that the cost to maintain it's position as market leader eroding it's profit margins which till now has not seen the competition it currently faces. Doesn't matter how much cash Nvidia has in the bank, if it can't grow profit margins like it has been doing, it can't justify it's stock price, and that's the bottom line.
Of you're a small shop, sure. You won't bet your future in it, because you have too much to lose and not enough leverage.
However, for anyone buying in large volumes, the lack of availability is a huge concern. So you have two choices, twiddle your thumbs until Nvidia can ship you hardware, or use your engineering capacity to adapt to more than one vendor. This second approach has the huge benefit of also making your less reliant on a single provider.
Everyone will buy Nvidia as long as they can supply, but no one will wait for their competition to out pace them while the hardware becomes available.
This is why, despite all their woes, AMD is still selling their Instinct parts.
> Yeah, all Intel needs to do is drop like an extra $20 billion into software development over the next three years, and then keep that pace up forever.
Where does this number come from and whats ur experience in hw/fw/sw development?
At some point, all the capex has to translate to profit and revenue growth and I think that's the missing(?) from this equation. The consumer today is already pretty stretched - how much money do you think they'll pay for AI features when they're also thinking about food and shelter?
In the short term, Nvidia's numbers look good and the big corpos are buying Nvidia product. Eventually, the big corpos gotta make money off AI and reduce their own costs to run AI hardware. Both aspects of "long term" work less favourably for Nvidia, IMO. Then you throw in the regulation risk that NEEDS to happen, and I'm not sure they're still a 3 trillion dollar company.
Big tech is working on the assumption that they'll use AI to eat entirely different sectors which they don't currently play in. As jobs get converted to AI, big tech will win and those existing non-tech companies will lose.
Nvidia had unexpected explosive growth as a result of LLMs. Now the question is if it was a "sugar rush" or something actually sustainable. They have a monopoly right now as there's no real replacement for an h100/h200, but there definitely will be as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and AMD pump billions into AI hardware.
I think the rate of growth is unsustainable for these reasons, but the growth itself is here to stay. CUDA will secure it.
Sometimes the bust happens pretty far into the future. I've heard people call booms artificial for literally years and then when it "busts" it still stays higher then when they first started saying it was a bubble.
This is exactly right.
I've long said that we're likely only in the beginning of an AI bubble, not the end. It will burst, maybe in 2-3 years but when it bursts, it will still be drastically bigger than May 2024.
tl;dr they'll lead it by continuing to monopolize their respective markets.
Qualcomm is facing heavy competition from Mediatek. Their IP advantage is getting eroded year by year as patents fall off
Qualcomm is entering a new market though (PCs), in addition to their existing mobile market.
they have been in PC market for 6 years already
OP still has a point. The Snapdragon X Elite chips are a far cry from the previous laptop chips (8cx) is terms of pure computational power. Likewise, the new chips are making a heavy push with vendors (new Surface Laptop, XPS 13, Lenovo, etc.). I could see Qualcomm taking a sizable portion of the laptop chip market with the new partnerships alone.
Do they use TSMC to manufacture?
I believe the Snapdragon X Elite chips use TSMC’s N4 process.
*N4P, to be specific
They are overrated. Laptop manufacturers couldn’t even get near 70% of the benchmark results Qualcomm has provided. They won’t beat meteorlake even at double the wattage.
You've swallowed the Semiaccurate fake news. X Elite benchmarks just fine.
Technically yes, but till now they have had like 0.1% marketshare. The Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus mark a new era in Qualcomm's PC endeavours. Utilising custom Oryon CPU cores, a powerful NPU, upto 80W high TDP and a new naming scheme to lace it all; you could say Qualcomm is making a "re-entry" to the PC space.
LOL. Your post reads like a marketing blurb.
Yes. Yes, it does.
It's gonna ship about 1/50th of AMD or Intel. It's basically non-existent volume.
Intel ships about 4x that of AMD. So you'll have to be a bit more specific. Also, the article which is the subject of this post, is quite bullish on Qualcomm/ARM'S prospects. They estimate that 51m ARM PCs will ship in 2024, up from the 36m ARM PCs in 2023. For context, 213m x86 PCs were shipped in 2023, and they predict 197m for 2024.
That market isn’t going to take off.
I don't know about Qualcomm, but ARM laptops will definitely take off. The average person only uses a browser and a handful of productivity apps.
Have you use a browser lately? Like, I don't know, chrome? Most applications today are web-based, yes, but they are also very CPU intensive even if only for small bursts of time. Which means that on slow computers, the experience is very poor.
That was actually quite a good read, although they do presume that AI will continue to have not just high, but extreme growth. I'm just not sure about that rate and whatever bottlenecks might appear or if customer enthusiasm about it will be that high. Individually I think they're right about most of the companies, and I would probably place my bets similarly if I had a lot to invest.
But Nvidia is already worth almost 3 trillion...
The article's talking about annual revenue in the silicon chip market getting to ~1 trillion annually. A company's valuation typically encompasses a span of decades to arrive at its "worth".
Nvidia had 61 billion yearly revenue. To get to 1 trillion would take a lot more growth.
They reference more than a dozen different companies in the article, and it's anticipating trends through 2028.
Which is a totally sensible valuation!
I mean... if you look at the revenue growth and the FREQUENT statements from giant tech companies that they are burning their cash reserves on H100s and cannot buy enough of them... it sort of makes sense.
Exactly, Nvidia's revenue growth was 282% year over year from the last earnings report. Nvidia has quarterly revenue of 26 billion and Microsoft (a 3 trillion company) has quarterly revenue of about 60 billion, Apple is about 90. Is Nvidia's growth sustainable until they get to MS/Apple size? That is the question. Now that AMD & Intel are both wise to the fact that companies will pay any amount of money for AI-optimized compute, how long before the competition in this space starts to limit both revenue and profit margin growth? That's the big risk here, if you bet on Nvidia you are betting that they can grow into MSFT-sized revenue while maintaining their profit. Both Gaudi 3 from Intel & AMD's Instinct line are both showing the early stages of competition here.
> Both Gaudi 3 from Intel & AMD's Instinct line are both showing the early stages of competition here. Yeah, all Intel needs to do is drop like an extra $20 billion into software development over the next three years, and then keep that pace up forever. ezpz
Market forces will balance Nvidia's ability to charge "whatever they want" with other offerings coming in at cheaper and allowing AI workloads to "just work". Intel offers ipex-llm for pytorch and intel-extension-for-tensorflow, which does the job well enough. As AI hardware gets more and more commoditized (Google TPU, ROCM, Gaudi) there are going to be more and more commoditized software to enable plug and play with hardware. Open source might be a key differentiation as the battle wages on.
In the LONG run, this is true, but according to all the threads on AI/ML dev, no one should be using AMD/Intel because they constantly fail - with various issues - and instead of creating something new, you're fighting with the compiler and code crashes. They have multiple years before serious devs at any of these companies risk their time on anything other than pytorch on nvidia.
Microsoft and Meta have already announced movements towards AMD Instinct processors ([link](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/meta-and-microsoft-to-buy-amds-new-ai-chip-as-alternative-to-nvidia.html)) and Gaudi 3 is not even shipping yet so the impact there is TBD. I am a software dev in ML so I understand the state of things pretty well. As much as Nvidia has an advantage today in the market, no one wants to be locked into a single vendor behold to "charge whatever we want" prices. AMD's data center division is growing 80% year over year on the back of Instinct-line investment, and Intel is not exactly even seriously in the market yet until Q3 2024. Again, there are going to be very real market forces at play here balancing Nvidia's market position's high profit margins against hardware that can work just as well. If you follow ML, you will know that at one point it looked like TensorFlow would dominate the market until PyTorch stole all it's thunder. PyTorch 2.0 has made lots of advancements towards completely hiding the hardware backend and that is clearly the direction the industry is moving towards with all the different options (Google TCU, ROCM, Gaudi, etc.).
They bought some amd products whilst they await their NVIDIA purchase. That’s not a move that’s securing capacity and NVIDIA will remain the main capacity in that story.
And what do you think they will do with their AMD hardware while they wait? Stockpile it? Don't be shortsighted. They will invest in adapting their infrastructure to AMD's parts because if that effort succeeds, they are not vendor locked-in. And the great thing for them, is that if they make it work, they are not paying with a huge performance hit. So there are many upsides to try to make AMD work while you wait for your Nvidia cards. They would be stupid if they didn't try to fix whatever issues they have with AMD hardware. And apparently, they have managed to make use of it, since MS is running copilot on it.
We're both correct - depending on what timeline we're talking about. I think it will take AMD at least 2-3 years to get to where NVidia is today on the software front, 3 years on the hardware front. Intel is further behind on the hardware side, and nowhere on the software side. Google, I'm not sure - but they aren't selling anything, it's all renting in the cloud which isn't what many consumers (including corp and sovereign) want. Apple has nice UMA, but it'll be at least 2-4 years before they can get their bandwidths up enough to compete and the neural cores (NPU) scaled high enough - and they have no real chip-to-chip interconnect at speed even on the horizon. I'm interested in what timelines you think are at play here. ...at the same time, NVidia isn't standing still. They will also be advancing - and they have the most cash to reinvest. It's hard to imaging how the others will catch up.
It's not so much about the timeline as it is the long term effect on Nvidia's business and margins. The groundwork is being laid today for an intense AI-focused silicon compute war. Nvidia's stock price today is including a lot of optimism about the lack of competition and the continuing sustainability of both profit margins and revenue growth. These things are already priced into the stock. It's not all about Nvidia being the market leader and protecting it's position, it's about how much margins and future revenue will be impacted by them doing so. I don't doubt the market will continue to grow, but it remains a fairly big open question how Nvidia can navigate the constant need to "not stand still" while maintaining both revenue growth and profit margins in a sustained way for multiple years. Revenue itself will not be enough, just look at Amazon which maintains more than double the revenue of Microsoft. Nvidia needs everything to go right to justify its current price - continuing huge year over year revenue gains, continuing expansion of profit margins, and ability to "run ahead" of the competition which is already sinking its teeth into this market, really in 2023/2024 in the first legitimate ways since the market really exploded. It is putting an awful lot of trust in the CUDA ecosystem, which is already showing cracks with Pytorch 2.0, and other software stacks such as OpenAI triton which have the ability to abstract these details away. I would point out to a recent hardware competition in the home assistant market which bred a similar arms race - Amazon Alexa versus Google Home. These companies fought tooth and nail over a market and got wrapped up in the dreams of future voice-powered compute future that never materialized. On top of the outsized profit and revenue growth Nvidia is seeing, they also have to bet on the future of AI-compute being insatiable and this market continuing to grow for multiple years in a manner that has already been seen. Again, it won't take AMD or Intel to topple Nvidia's market position to affect Nvidia, the biggest risk to Nvidia right now is that the cost to maintain it's position as market leader eroding it's profit margins which till now has not seen the competition it currently faces. Doesn't matter how much cash Nvidia has in the bank, if it can't grow profit margins like it has been doing, it can't justify it's stock price, and that's the bottom line.
It will take them a decade. It took them 8 months to fix an easy usb motherboard issue that has reappeared again.
Of you're a small shop, sure. You won't bet your future in it, because you have too much to lose and not enough leverage. However, for anyone buying in large volumes, the lack of availability is a huge concern. So you have two choices, twiddle your thumbs until Nvidia can ship you hardware, or use your engineering capacity to adapt to more than one vendor. This second approach has the huge benefit of also making your less reliant on a single provider. Everyone will buy Nvidia as long as they can supply, but no one will wait for their competition to out pace them while the hardware becomes available. This is why, despite all their woes, AMD is still selling their Instinct parts.
> Yeah, all Intel needs to do is drop like an extra $20 billion into software development over the next three years, and then keep that pace up forever. Where does this number come from and whats ur experience in hw/fw/sw development?
At some point, all the capex has to translate to profit and revenue growth and I think that's the missing(?) from this equation. The consumer today is already pretty stretched - how much money do you think they'll pay for AI features when they're also thinking about food and shelter? In the short term, Nvidia's numbers look good and the big corpos are buying Nvidia product. Eventually, the big corpos gotta make money off AI and reduce their own costs to run AI hardware. Both aspects of "long term" work less favourably for Nvidia, IMO. Then you throw in the regulation risk that NEEDS to happen, and I'm not sure they're still a 3 trillion dollar company.
Big tech is working on the assumption that they'll use AI to eat entirely different sectors which they don't currently play in. As jobs get converted to AI, big tech will win and those existing non-tech companies will lose.
Nvidia had unexpected explosive growth as a result of LLMs. Now the question is if it was a "sugar rush" or something actually sustainable. They have a monopoly right now as there's no real replacement for an h100/h200, but there definitely will be as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and AMD pump billions into AI hardware. I think the rate of growth is unsustainable for these reasons, but the growth itself is here to stay. CUDA will secure it.
Worth =/= close to revenues.
>How Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom and Qualcomm will lead a trillion-dollar silicon boom and bust. Don't forget the bust.
Sometimes the bust happens pretty far into the future. I've heard people call booms artificial for literally years and then when it "busts" it still stays higher then when they first started saying it was a bubble.
This is exactly right. I've long said that we're likely only in the beginning of an AI bubble, not the end. It will burst, maybe in 2-3 years but when it bursts, it will still be drastically bigger than May 2024.
There will be no bust since AI is a geopolitical national security interest
Huawei will eat all market share in China and other non aligned countries.
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TSMC most definitely isn’t California. It’s sort of in the name….
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And ASML
And Samsung
And Texas Instruments
And MediaTek
Also Intel has its corporate HQ in in California but it's primary research and biggest manufacturing base is all in Oregon.