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Qualcomm

Over the last decade, the rise of smartphones and tablets has fundamentally transformed the semiconductor business concern. As the market has matured, withal, an increasingly large number of companies have struggled to remain profitable. Firms similar Samsung and Apple tree earn the vast bulk of the profits on smartphone sales. A handful of SoC providers boss the component business organization, with Qualcomm at the relative top of the market and companies similar Rockchip, Allwinner, and Mediatek belongings large swathes of the budget and midrange segments.

The in a higher place means less turn a profit for other firms. If Computex was any indication, these companies are looking towards emerging markets in self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, next-generation connectivity solutions, artificial intelligence, and a range of other topics.

"We are going from hype phase to more a reality phase with real products. Y'all can see them, yous tin feel them," Hugo Swart, head of Qualcomm's consumer electronics and IoT businesses, told Reuters. "I run into concluding yr was a twelvemonth of a lot of promises and this yr is a textile realization."

ExtremeTech spoke to Anshel Sag, an annotator with Moor Insights & Strategy, who talked about how the focus and nature of the Computex trade show is irresolute. "Computex was always more of a traditionally PC hardware for both consumers and business show. Now it'due south turned into more of a high-end PC hardware show with IoT to kicking," Sag said. "Many of the Taiwanese vendors want to go involved in IoT and that'southward why you're seeing and so much support for them from the chip vendors." Chip vendors, in this instance, refers to companies like ARM, Intel, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and other SoC designers.

PX2

Nvidia's Bulldoze PX2 platform.

These reports jive with what nosotros've seen from companies like AMD, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, and Waymo over the past few years. After largely sitting out the AI marketplace, AMD is positioning its upcoming Vega products for AI and HPC workloads, Nvidia is making a huge push button into self-driving vehicles, Tesla already has its Autopilot characteristic on the market place, and Alphabet's Waymo project could squad up with Honda to bring self-driving cars out by 2020. We tend to think about the markets for these products equally being strictly tied to the auction of only 1 vehicle, simply the number of discrete components that go into creating one cocky-driving car is enormous.

Co-ordinate to Sag, devices like smart toasters and fridges draw a fair amount of derision, but they aren't where virtually companies are actually focusing their R&D efforts. At the same time, even so, nobody really knows what killer capabilities, analytics, or technologies will exist the first to drive mass consumer adoption and support. Wearables, to date, take just had a modest impact. But that could modify equally applied science, bombardment life, and software all ameliorate. Nobody wants to be caught napping when and if that happens, so we're seeing a lot of mud go flung at the wall in the name of finding out what might stick.