Partner content: AI powered productivity - How Snapdragon X Elite is leading the Copilot+ charge
CRN spoke to Carlos Fernandez Pilo, Director, EMEA Enterprise and Commercial Channel Sales at Qualcomm Technologies International, Ltd. to learn more about how the company is the only silicon vendor today powering the Copilot+ PC.
AI is at something of an inflection point at the moment. Across the channel, from vendors to end users, decision makers are scrambling to understand the huge potential over the next few years, as well as the business case today. In the AI PC, purpose-built hardware and software combine to put real world benefits into the hands of workforces across all sectors. Amongst all the AI hype, it's a sector that boasts far more immediate and tangible benefits.
For Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., it's a moment the company has been building towards for years.
We can agree that AI feels like something that's happened overnight but it's actually a long time in the making for Qualcomm Technologies. They have been working hard at AI for over 15 years to make this hybrid AI a reality.
"The journey started in 2007 when we introduced our first Qualcomm® Hexagon™ DSP on a Snapdragon® platform. The DSP's architecture was the foundation for what would become our Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (or, NPU). Since then, we've leveraged that technology across many different products and product categories over the years."
"With out rich legacy in the smartphone space where AI has also been prevalent, we've been able to refine and evolve that technology to get to where we are today, which is class leading – one of the most powerful NPUs we've seen in any laptop to date. That's why we're uniquely positioned to power this new Copilot+ category."
More than AI
Qualcomm Technologies rich mobile pedigree has also enabled it to deliver an extremely energy efficient product family for Microsoft Windows.
"Productivity takes a massive hit when your battery runs down, and we all suffer from battery anxiety with laptops in the market today. With Snapdragon X Elite processors, we have brought performance leadership to the windows ecosystem. Snapdragon X Elite is the fastest, most power efficient integrated NPU in a laptop available today."
"At Qualcomm Technologies, we bring a fundamentally different design approach to our products. Snapdragon X Elite is the embodiment of that philosophy. It's about low power, efficiency and that heritage we have from the smartphone space, where you don't have the luxury of having a huge battery or incorporating fans."
Boasting 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS) Snapdragon X Elite is able to offload AI tasks from the CPU or GPU and run them on device for best-in-class AI performance.
Getting AI-ready
When a new product category launches it can be easy to be sceptical or have concerns around the cost of investing in AI PCs, security and data privacy implications, and whether devices will be compatible with their current tech stack.
Carlos acknowledges that it's early days for AI PCs but it's important for IT leaders to think ahead when planning device refresh cycles as use cases and value will grow throughout the three-to-five-year device lifecycle.
"Most customers are at the beginning of their AI journey. The exciting part is that Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs embed AI capabilities and leverage the NPU from day one, right out of the box. Whether you're already on this journey or defining your AI strategy, this shouldn't prevent you from upgrading to Windows 11 now to start adopting these PCs in your organization."
Channel collaboration
A launch of this scale and this kind of industry disruption doesn't happen without close collaboration between vendors, distributors, resellers, and end users.
"We are at a pivotal moment in the compute industry, ushering in a new era of PCs. Collaborating with partners like TD Synnex gives us that opportunity to have a broader reach to many of those retailer partners, to educate them, and to help them understand the benefits of this technology, and how to position the value."
Building for enterprise
For Qualcomm Technologies, they have been busy at work with Microsoft to ensure that all commercial workforces that deploy AI PCs powered by Snapdragon have their traditional productivity, creative, and collaborative apps available.
"We've been hard at work with many customers over the last three to four years, evaluating these products in the workplace to make sure they integrate into their existing ecosystems, to understand what applications they're using. We've also been working very closely with Microsoft to ensure they run and are fully compatible, the latest figure is 900+ apps already validated to work out of the box."
The road ahead
As exciting as this emergent AI PC generation is, much of its promise is bundled up in its potential to deliver over the next few years – well within a device's lifespan. Qualcomm Technologies have set the wheels in motion, the task of unlocking much of the latent potential in localised AI rests on the industry, and on developers to make use of the silicon.
"Qualcomm is very focused on supporting the growing ecosystem, we recently launched the Qualcomm® AI Hub designed to help developers optimize and deploy AI models quickly by supporting AI frameworks and runtimes, developer libraries, system software, and popular operating systems."
"Regardless of where you are on the AI journey – most CIOs they will tell you, ‘Yes, AI is top of mind' – but we're all on different points in that journey. It's important not to put this off. AI is here. It's already embedded within Windows 11, and it's already powered by Snapdragon.
Click here to learn more from Qualcomm and TD SYNNEX on AI PCs and the future of personal computing.
Snapdragon and Qualcomm branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
This Article is sponsored by TD SYNNEX and Qualcomm