AI Semis Market Landscape
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.
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.
The large, incumbent chip companies are all choosing to embrace the trend of Roll-Your-Own chips by offering support services to non-chip companies’ efforts. Done well this may end up driving those customers to buy more catalog parts. Hopefully.
The data center silicon market is massive, but also challenging for incumbents let alone new entrants. We do some math to back this up.
Will Apple build its own RF chips – it turns out this is much more complicated than it sounds, and Apple is already getting almost everything it wants from its RF suppliers. However, nowhere in this piece do we say it will never happen.
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.
Part of the magic of semis is the ability to integrate multiple chips into a single chip. History shows, that the vendor whose chip sits closest to a system’s critical software wins the strategic high ground. What will that mean in autos?
AWS announced updates to two of its chips last week. And while we wonder why they didn’t announce more, their new chips demonstrate just how serious they are about rolling their own silicon (and how big Intel’s problems are).
Two Chinese companies – Tencent and Innosilicon – launched chips this month that look to be important steps forward for China’s semis efforts.
The market for base station and RAN silicon is shaping up to one of the most interesting to watch in the new year. And intel seems to have forgotten its long, sorry history in the space, making for some great viewing.
The shift from general purpose silicon to semi-custom and tailored SoCs presents a big opportunity for chip start-ups. If they follow a few simple rules.