Indian market's shift towards premium devices to drive Snapdragon 8 chipsets adoption: Qualcomm
Qualcomm says India has become a prime market for the company as it is gaining from the government's push for manufacturing, artificial intelligence and active involvement of home grown companies.
Chipset major Qualcomm expects shift of the Indian market towards the premium device segment will drive adoption of the company's latest and premium smartphone processor Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the country.
Qualcomm Technologies Group General Manager, Mobile, Compute, & XR (MCX), Alex Katouzian said that India has become a prime market for the company as it is gaining from the government's push for manufacturing, artificial intelligence and active involvement of home grown companies like Flipkart, Lenskart etc.
"I think the Indian market is turning more and more into a premium tier. So I think (Snapdragon) 8 Gen 5 will get accepted quite a bit. The reputation of Snapdragon in India is really good. Recently, we got data that we are number one in branding as well," Katouzian said.
According to CyberMedia Research, Snapdragon commands 40% market share in smartphones abovethe Rs 25,000 segment.
Qualcomm, at its annual flagship event Snapdragon Summit, launched its latest chipset Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform—the world's fastest mobile system-on-a-chip with CPU processing speed of up to 4.6 gigahertz in prime cores, GPU (graphics processing unit) speed of 1.2 GHz per core.
The CPU in the new processor has 8 cores, which include 2 prime cores with a top speed of 4.6 GHz and six performance cores of up to 3.6 GHz.
The chipset has three slots of GPUs that can clock the top speed of 1.2 GHz per core. The new chipset has a hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) with 37% higher performance compared to the previous version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. NPU plays a key role in processing artificial intelligence (AI) based applications like real-time translation.
The company claimed that with 37% improvement in NPU, it will be able to add AI-based improvement in every frame of video, like AI-enabled mobile phone cameras have been doing for still photographs, in combination with its Spectra ISP (image signal processor) on the new chipset.
The latest premium offering in the Snapdragon 8 Elite series will be featured in flagship devices from global manufacturers and smartphone brands, including Honor, iQOO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, POCO, realme, REDMI, RedMagic, ROG, Samsung, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
Chinese smartphone makers have taken the lead in adopting the new chipsets for their devices, with Xiaomi already unveiling Xiaomi 17 Series smartphones based on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform.
Katouzian said that Qualcomm is now gaining a lot in India and engaging more deeply with the growing digital ecosystem in the country, driven by government push on electronics manufacturing, artificial intelligence, etc.
"India relationships are super strong from the government side, to retail side, to the carrier side, to the new opportunities. New OEMs (original equipment makers) are coming up with their manufacturing facilities that we are already working with. Automotive, two-wheelers, PC, XR (extended reality), our deal with Lenskart, it's a big one. India is a prime market for us," Katouzian said.
He said the government's push to have local manufacturing has been beneficial for the company.
"The government, seeing the benefits of AI data centre, automotive growth will benefit us. XR becoming more of a norm benefits us. As a consumption region for handsets and PCs benefits us. There are 20,000 Qualcomm employees in India," Katouzian said.
Qualcomm has also unveiled the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Snapdragon X2 Elite with a peak processing speed of 5 GHz and a neural process unit of 80 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) to step up its play in the personal computer segment.
"The PC side for us is super strong. We work with Lenovo India, Dell India, and HP India closely. We have very, very tight relationships. Asus is very strong there. We work with them tightly and closely. We go to distribution channels with them. We go to retail channels with them together. We invest with them together," Katouzian said.