Modern marketing
With all this new competition, especially the arrival of NVIDIA, which brought with it a more aggressive style of marketing, I was curious to know how Qualcomm is adapting. "The Snapdragon brand is starting to be recognised more widely," said Talluri. "But we want users to make decisions based on data, not just marketing. Also it's ultimately about how many units you ship, not just marketing."
"Messaging to OEMs is ultimately what matters. Different OEMs value different things, such as performance, time to market, etc. But we have our MDP to show what Snapdragon is capable of doing. We spend a lot of time on real-world applications."
Having said that Qualcomm is not blind to the need to make strong comparative claims. We had a long chat about how you go about comparing the relative performances of SoCs, and Qualcomm has attempted to rationalize this process with the release of benchmarks such as Vellamo, but we ended up agreeing that there are so many variables involved in determining the performance in a given handset that trying to compare the chips therein is largely futile.
One thing Qualcomm can control, however, is how it refers to its own chips, and the naming system for Snapdragon chips has frankly messy for some time. The suffixes have moved from QSD to MSM, except when they're APQ, and the numbering makes sense to maybe one or two people at Qualcomm towers.
So now we've got a system whereby chips are grouped into broad categories depending on their broad market positioning - entry-level, high-end, etc - which you can see illustrated in the chart below. The 28nm generation will occupy the S4 band and, and the numbers will rise alongside future generations.
These moves help, but the mobile SoC picture remains a complex, competitive, and constantly evolving one, which is just as well or I'd be out of a job. The respective players will continue to claim their chip offers unique benefits, but the good news it it's difficult now to buy a smartphone that doesn't deliver processing power that seemed utopian even five years ago.
