The neXt Curve reThink Podcast
The official podcast channel of neXt Curve, a research and advisory firm based in San Diego founded by Leonard Lee focused on the frontier markets and business opportunities forming at the intersect of transformative technologies and industry trends. This podcast channel features audio programming from our reThink podcast bringing our listeners the tech and industry insights that matter across the greater technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) sector.
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-> Artificial Intelligence
-> Cloud & Edge Computing
-> Semiconductor Tech & Industry Trends
-> Digital Transformation
-> Consumer Electronics
-> New Media & Communications
-> Consumer & Industrial IoT
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-> Security, Privacy & Trust
-> Immersive Reality & XR
-> Emerging & Advanced ICT Technologies
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The neXt Curve reThink Podcast
XC Webcast 2025-Snapdragon Summit 2025 with Jim
I always have a blast spending time chatting and debating the leading edge tech topics of the day with my fellow analyst, especially Jim McGregor of TIRIAS Research and Karl Freund of Cambrian-AI Research LLC. It's even better when we are in Maui for these discussions as we were this week at Qualcomm's 10th Snapdragon Tech Summit 2025 (#paidtravel_snapdragon).
Jim and I took a moment to take one last look at a gorgeous view of Larry's Island as we recapped Snapdragon Tech Summit 2025. We cover personal AI, the ecosystem of you, HUMAIN's big announcement, and the new line up of Snapdragon X2 mobile and AI PC silicon.
Check it out and remember to follow neXt Curve, Tirias Research, and Cambrian-AI Research LLC for the tech and industry insights that mattered from Qualcomm's Snapdragon Tech Summit 2025!
Hey everyone, this is Leonard Lee, executive Analyst at Next Group, and I'm here with Jim McGregor
Jim McGregor:from Furious Research.
Leonard Lee:Hey, you've been
Jim McGregor:practicing. This is awesome. Where are we,
Leonard Lee:Jim?
Jim McGregor:We're in beautiful Maui, Hawaii. Actually, technically we're in Cali. Yeah, you gotta love this. We even have a paraglider in the background. Yeah, we do.
Leonard Lee:Yeah, we have a bunch of people in the pool here and a lot of background noise.'cause they're doing a tear down here of the Snapdragon stuff. But you will not hear it. Why? Because of. Noise cancellation. Yes. Well, you're supposed to say ai. Well, okay, ai, obviously, you know it's, you're a super nerd because you have to use all the complex lingo. Jim, come. Come on. Okay. I know you're getting picky here. I know. I am getting picky, but
Jim McGregor:Yeah, besides AI is everywhere.
Leonard Lee:we really have to say that anymore? No, we don't. Okay. I'm kind of AIed out, but anyways, we are here for Snapdragon. Tech Summit 2025 and it's actually been wonderful. It has. And the privilege that snap, the folks at Qualcomm invited us here and, it was a great show. It was a great, it's the 10th, 10th year
Jim McGregor:of their Snapdragon summit. It's the ninth year they've held it here in Hawaii. You can ask for better weather, you can ask for a better location, and they modified every year according to what their key products and technology introductions are. So this year was really all about the, well, first off, ai of course, but also about. The handsets, the next generation handset platform and the next generation PC platform. Yeah.
Leonard Lee:Yeah. And they talk a lot about MPU again.
Jim McGregor:Well, you NPU, that's a key part of their AI strategy, but it's part of the heterogeneous AI strategy. Yeah. Good. That includes the CPU and the GPU.
Leonard Lee:Absolutely. And, I had a chat with, Don McGuire, and we talked about one of the big themes the anchor of this conference, which is personal ai, right? Yes. And so this whole evolution of where we start off with large language models that were like one shot and monolithic toward, these mixture experts, reasoning models, and now agentic, right? Yeah. And so, Christiano did a great job of blue printing, a future of where personal AI is really gonna bring all this stuff together. It's ambitious.
Jim McGregor:Well, I'll be honest with you, I think personal AI is really also that evolution to edge ai because There's no reason to have Edge ai if you can just do everything in the cloud and you have connectivity. but if you actually have. That personalization, if you actually have access to your information, your knowledge graph, your likes, your thoughts on any mobile platform that you're on. And that can range from a handset to a pc, to a car, to your, VR glasses to whatever. But if you have that, that really makes AI personalized. Sure.
Leonard Lee:Yeah. And ubiquitous and, uh, pervasive for you. And so they introduced this, everything that Jim just said, you can encapsulate into three words, ecosystem of. Hey, I snapdragon you. Yes, but you, you, I love it when you gimme that wizard. Look, you know, Jim doesn't know everything all the time, which is marketing. I have no, I don't agree with all the marketing terms, I'll be honest with you.
Jim McGregor:I think the personally I am does a better job of, rather than the ecosystem of you. But, you know, that's, that's my preference.
Leonard Lee:It's a lot of stuff to unpack, a lot of underlying technologies. There are a lot of complexity that still needs to be worked out. I took it as a vision, a direction. I think it's things that maybe not so obvious to. casual audiences, but I think this was an attempt by, the Qualcomm team to, make it more of a palatable, accessible concept.
Jim McGregor:I would agree with that. And quite honestly, probably the most impressive thing to me, not only besides their products. Was the ecosystem. Yeah. We had Vinh, uh, Kumar actually talk about that whole AI experience, that personal AI experience. And for the first time, I think we actually saw those logical on device AI applications. Yeah. With everything, LLM with, page ai. Yeah. You know, having those types of examples and bringing that in. Not to mention seeing what, humane is doing. Yeah, that was very inspirational where Humane's actually creating kind of an AI platform and AI Devi, they're trying to create a whole AI platform where it really is, not only, well, it's really for enterprise, but still it's personalized. It's, and it really breaks down the barriers of all these. Thousands of applications we've developed over the past 30, 40 years.
Leonard Lee:Yeah. And, I had a chance to meet with Teek Amman, who is the CEO O of, uh, humane. Humane. And, we go back. A long ways. And so it was good to catch up with him, but also get some, insights. Sort of a preview. But deeper insights into what he has in mind. There's more
Jim McGregor:coming on October
Leonard Lee:27th. Yeah. Yeah. And he is always been a visionary. For those of you who know about him and his history with, Rakuten Mobile, it was arguably the first open, ran. Um, arguably tough. It was actually. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we can argue, but anyways, he thinks big. He executes big. It's gonna be fun. Yes. And great to see how Qualcomm and Humane collaborate and defining what the next step at B of AI is going to be. Right? I agree. And so they introduced, humane one. Which I think was a rebranding or, um, a rejiggering of Humane os they also introduced a line of
Jim McGregor:laptops. A IPC. Yeah. Actually a laptop. and then they say they've got more to come, but talked about a Snapdragon based laptop. and having that whole, AI layer integrated into the laptop.
Leonard Lee:Right, right. Horizon s for scholars, horizon elites. And then, I can't remember. It was, I remember there was
Jim McGregor:a Horizon Pro,
Leonard Lee:Yeah, I remember that. I think, pro is going to come loaded with, or I think actually it's the extreme that's gonna be, anyway, the pro is actually gonna have the Integr, the 5G modems. A lot of stuff, I mean, they packed a lot of stuff in this year it was, it was three full days and so as much as you probably think that we were on vacation, anytime that I spend with this guy is always work a little bit torturous. Sometimes'cause he, he, makes fun of me all the time.
Jim McGregor:Excuse me. Who keeps calling me old? Oh, I just found out you're almost
Leonard Lee:the same age. Oh my God. Shh. I want everyone to think I'm 25-year-old. Oh yeah. That's, it's out, it's, Hey, you blew that last night.
Jim McGregor:Okay.
Leonard Lee:Okay. So anyway. Yeah, some really great stuff. Again, going back to the MPU, they're leaning into MPU 80 tops, right? At least on the p for
Jim McGregor:the pc, for the Snapdragon eight Elite or X two, elite Extreme.
Leonard Lee:Yeah.
Jim McGregor:so they're gonna have a whole family of new, processors for the, PC family. Basically increase performance at every level. especially in the NPU double performance, especially in the extreme. So they're gonna have the, X two Elite and they're gonna have the X two Elite extreme, which really ups their game, on the GPU level, on the CPU level, on the NPU level, right? To where they're gonna be really, really competitive, according to some of their benchmarks. maybe, even industry leader in a lot of areas.
Leonard Lee:Right, at least for the segments that they're positioning. Exactly. The SOC for. But yeah, so the MPU wars are on again, right? And we're just looking at like basically a year cycle where, you know, six months ago there wasn't a lot of talk about MPU, but going back to the comment that you made earlier, there are a lot more ISVs doing substantial things with the. MPU Yes. Versus last year, that was sort of the missing ingredient. and probably the thing that was lacking in catalyzing the use of, MPU and driving developer interest. So, Any final takeaways? Otherwise we gotta jump on planes and get out here. Get outta paradise. I would just,
Jim McGregor:I would just say that, they gave us what we expected, increased performance on the flagship. chip sets for handsets and also increased performance for the pc. Christiano said We're in it for the long haul. We're not leaving. they're continuing to invest. not only in their technology, but they're investing in the ecosystem. They're definitely investing in marketing. the one thing they did give us was kind of a preview, saying that they're gonna have six G devices or promise six G devices in 2028.
Leonard Lee:Pre-commercial, right? Yes. And then, um, oh, the other thing to highlight, third Gen Orion, CPU course, and 18 of them loaded up into the elite or extreme version. it's good actually. I'm very happy to see that they're, putting a lot of attention into the CPU. I was expecting a little bit more love on the GPU end of things. And I wish that there was an AI to get rid of people that walk into our shot. But hey, you didn't hear that from me. Yes. So thanks to, Qualcomm for inviting us out here. absolutely. For another installment of a Snapdragon Tech summit. Two, and this is the 2025, version, which was great. And it's always wonderful to hang out with you. Jim, it's unfortunate that, Carl couldn't join us. He's here as well, but he was a little bit under the weather, we'll have him back in recapping, the month of September, which is truly insane. Yep. Truly. take care. We'll see you, stateside. Thank you.
