AI Semis – the Have and Have Nots
Qualcomm has a robust AI offering, and the market for AI Inference at the Edge is huge. But Qualcomm and every other company not named Nvidia, will struggle to ride this wave to AI riches.
Qualcomm has a robust AI offering, and the market for AI Inference at the Edge is huge. But Qualcomm and every other company not named Nvidia, will struggle to ride this wave to AI riches.
How do CPU companies market in a newly, highly-fragmented market? There are no easy answers in this very complex, rapidly moving environment, but there is some hope.
Apple has a history of relegating its homegrown chips to the Apple Watch. Is that the fate of their future cellular modem?
There are really three markets for AI semis – training, cloud inference and edge inference. All of them are already fairly crowded. Choose your battles carefully.
We provide a basic look at why GPUs are the chip of choice for AI workloads, with a look at the early days of Nvidia CUDA.
GF’s results disappointed, and opens the door to questions about its long term future.
Should we value Nvidia as a software stock? Its CUDA software is a major competitive advantage in AI. Even if we do this, it is hard to get comfortable with the current share price.
Many semis companies say they want to sell software. We think they really want recurring revenue and software company multiples. And what they really need is competitive advantage, which software can sometimes provide but is not the only way.
We did some math to show market share and profit share in the foundry business. This data maps to intuition, but the scale of TSMC’s dominance and Intel’s declining fortunes stand out.
Less than a decade ago, CPUs were the dominant form of compute and everyone ‘knew’ the market could only support two vendors. Today, there are over a dozen companies making CPUs.