Qualcomm said it has launched a new brand called Dragonwing as it expands its footprint more into enterprise and industrial use cases.
The move, which comes ahead of Mobile World Congress, highlights how Qualcomm is looking to be more than a mobile computing chipmaker. Sure, it has expanded into PCs, autos and elsewhere, but the game plan is much broader.
In a blog post, Qualcomm said Dragonwing is designed to be "relevant to more industries than ever before." The company said the Dragonwing effort is designed to target industrial robots, handhelds and drones to name a few.
"Qualcomm is expanding its brand with the new Dragonwing set of processors to go wider than ever before," said Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller. "The interesting announcement though is the work on hybrid AI, where Qualcomm gets access to the data center, a totally new total addressable market (TAM)."
Dragonwing lands at an opportune time given physical AI is kicking off as is edge AI use cases that will need low-power compute and connectivity. These technologies will sit at the intersection of AI and automation. Physical AI, world foundation models will move to forefront
For instance, Honeywell executives argued that the industrial automation play has been overlooked. Speaking at an investment conference, Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur put AI in context with other technologies.
The main point is that AI is one part of Honeywell's big picture that revolves around autonomy.
Kapor said:
"The biggest trend I see is in context of Honeywell as move towards autonomy. This is something which is not discussed enough. We discuss things in isolation. There are three trends which are coming together for a company like us. First is ability to collect data on cloud. Second is 5G, which allows you to collect data without wires with many buildings and many plants. And finally, AI. How do you use the three together and build a solution which takes automation toward autonomy?"
Qualcomm said Dragonwing products will be aimed at energy and utilities, retail, supply chain, manufacturing and telecom. Qualcomm said that it is targeting $22 billion in non-handset revenue by 2029 led by AI and its applications in industries such as automotive.
Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, reiterated that industrial edge AI applications will be a big market, on the company’s first quarter earnings call. Amon said:
"We continue to believe that industrial edge devices with connectivity, high-performance computing and on device AI will become one of our largest addressable opportunities fueled by the secular trends of digital transformation. As such, we're accelerating our investments in solutions, ecosystem and broad channel enablement to position ourselves for growth while we navigate the industry-wide inventory draw down."
