Qualcomm Announces AI Chips To Compete With AMD and Nvidia 6
Qualcomm has entered the AI data center chip race with its new AI200 and AI250 accelerators, directly challenging Nvidia and AMD's dominance by promising lower power costs and high memory capacity. CNBC reports: The AI chips are a shift from Qualcomm, which has thus far focused on semiconductors for wireless connectivity and mobile devices, not massive data centers. Qualcomm said that both the AI200, which will go on sale in 2026, and the AI250, planned for 2027, can come in a system that fills up a full, liquid-cooled server rack. Qualcomm is matching Nvidia and AMD, which offer their graphics processing units, or GPUs, in full-rack systems that allow as many as 72 chips to act as one computer. AI labs need that computing power to run the most advanced models.
Qualcomm's data center chips are based on the AI parts in Qualcomm's smartphone chips called Hexagon neural processing units, or NPUs. "We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level," Durga Malladi, Qualcomm's general manager for data center and edge, said on a call with reporters last week.
Qualcomm's data center chips are based on the AI parts in Qualcomm's smartphone chips called Hexagon neural processing units, or NPUs. "We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level," Durga Malladi, Qualcomm's general manager for data center and edge, said on a call with reporters last week.
Me too? (Score:2)
Not sure about this. Q has a lot of experience with communications solutions, but they're new to AI processors. I don't know if they'll be able to pull it off.
The biggist issue with AI processors is their power consumption. A rack full of these new AI processors from Q is going to draw 160kW of power.
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That's like Microsoft coming in out of nowhere and saying, "We're going to take on Apple and Google in phones!"
Wait... shit.
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AMD's been doing this for forty years (ATI was founded in 1985) and their software support is still dogshit compared with nVidia. Unless Qualcomm is also rolling out first-class support for the top 20 open source projects using its GPUs nobody is going to give a shit. And seeing as Qualcomm's ARM laptops flopped precisely because of poor software support I expect no better from this.
good luck: this is not 3dfx gaming gpu with a joystick port but for an accelerator
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Or even fucking weirder, your someday-girlfriend... god, it's weird to even say- Qualcomm?