If you run a company, you may have been down in the tranches, focused largely on how to end this year and preparing for next year with planning and budgeting. And so chances are you may have missed some important events taking place in the technology sector that are likely to have significant impact on entire industries in the years to come, and most likely on your business as well.
For instance, competition in the processor sector has been heating up and in a dramatic fashion that Intel’s dominance and AMD’s strong position in the PC sector may be challenged by others. And with an explosive adoption of AI, 2024 promises to be a big year for both the brand-new electronics and IT markets, on the one hand, and the IT asset disposition and recycling sectors, a sector that I track, on the other.
The latest to announce a big move in the processor space is Qualcomm, which promised that its forthcoming Snapdragon X Elite processor will outperform those of Apple, Intel, and AMD. It has even said that it would outperform Intel Core i7 processors and that it would be faster than Apple’s M2 chip in reaching peak multi-thread performance. Big statement but exciting news and an indicator of major transformation we are likely to experience next year.
Qualcomm’s announcement adds to a plethora of similar significant announcements made recently by Intel, AMD and others, who want to challenge NVIDIA’s dominance of the AI processor market. If Qualcomm reaches its stated goal, it will probably deliver before summer of 2024 a 4nm process with a massive 136GB/s of memory bandwidth. And the personal computer, a market that has been dormant, in fact in decline for many quarters, is the main target for Qualcomm.
In addition, Qualcomm announced a new project it called Snapdragon Seamless, a system that would enable competing operating system like Android, Windows, as well as Snapdragon devices to discover each other and enable task discovery and sharing. This is a very serious development with big promises that could work only if Qualcomm can penetrate the PC sector. So far we are told that PC giants Lenovo and Dell, as well as Microsoft are attentive to that technology, but Qualcomm has its work cut out to get to the finishing line.
