Gadgetory

it starts to like eBay here reporting live from CES 2015 I'm here with Michelle lately senior director of marketing at Qualcomm and we're very very privileged to be able to spend some time with welcome the makers of a very famous chip that's just released here at CES here to talk a little bit more about the Snapdragon 800 absolutely so we actually have Snapdragon 800 to your products and our newest is Snapdragon 810 very no worries very very excited to be showing that off here at CES in our booth and also excited to have the first commercial device out with Snapdragon 810 which is LG G flex 2 very very exciting you know if you followed us on the premium tier for a while you know that we've really been pushing the envelope in the area of multimedia key reason being we do a lot of consumer research and one of the things that we found with folks who are in that through cutting-edge community is they really want to have the latest and greatest camera the best video experience the audio experience and so we've really been driving that on the premium tier one of the other reasons that we do that though is because when we design at the premium tier point we're then able to take all of those blocks of technologies and we're able to scale those across the road map so even someone who is within a budget of maybe a hundred dollar smartphone or seven hundred dollar smartphone they should still get a great experience at their price point and that's really our mantra so we design up at that premium point but then we're able to scale the technology down so what you'll see on the Snapdragon 810 is you'll see that this is now we're on to our third generation 4k device we can record and playback in 4k we've added hardware compression so hevc if you're familiar with that dot 265 so that makes just a much better experience you know you don't get I always talk about the swirling circle of death right when you're on your video the brain don't want that right so you want it to be a really really smooth experience we have our fluence pro audio you can go down to our our theater downstairs and here bit about a little of our audio capability and then we've really upped the ante on the camera so most people that I talk to now they may own a standalone digital camera I do but I rarely have it with me I always have my phone so I want my phone camera to be fantastic and so on the 810 what we've done is we have a dual isp but we've up to the bitrate to 14 bit so support for a larger sensor better camera capability but in addition to hardware we also offer an array of software what i would call middleware for camera capabilities that take advantage of our heterogeneous computing paradigm if you will so that we can do post processing pre and post processing that gets a better camera experience and you can see a little bit of that down in the booth that's me be checking it out great know a lot of people really interested to know about the DSP and audio processing and traditionally that's an area that Qualcomm is really excelled in we spoke with Wolfson and others you know they've been adopted in some of the your competitors products but can you talk a little bit about what call comes down in the audio set of things absolutely so we have two pieces on the audio side we do have a DSP integrated into the Snapdragon the reason we do that is you know you know we have an SOC not just a CPU and the reason for that is because the pre pre eminent piece of that we have to keep in our mind when we design is power goes right always so you could probably process pretty much anything on a cpu but sometimes it's completely overkill you don't need it so we have a DSP it's our own technology it's incredibly low power it runs in parallel to the CPU and it's very very efficient and we found that for audio and in some cases video it's a really nice little efficient engine and we don't even have to bother with the CPU cores we can run it on the DSP very low power and so we do a lot of our audio processing in that DSP in addition to the DSP we also have a codec that's part of the chipset an audio codec and we use that and we've been able to get just really really good quality audio and then it takes advantage of the pairing with the DSP to do that at low power and so we're able to do things like you know background noise cancellation Multi multi signal or for multi-channel excuse me for audio you know just be more technology so that you're going to just get much that's not audio it's voice but voice is still very important so you get a really really nice crisp voice quality so there's lots of things that we're doing today in the fluence problem sometimes I think that we forget that we actually use our smartphones for calling you do yeah it did we've been guilty of it too we actually haven't reviewed the voice calling because these devices are so incredibly powerful yeah it's a big it's a big update for Paul come everything's moving towards 64-bit arguably I mean quokka makes the finest s of C's in the world I'm just curious to know what you see kind of coming for tablets especially you know we obviously attending invidious press conference where they release the Tegra x1 and they're calling you there superchip one teraflops under 10 watts of power which is qualcomm going to be kind of delineating further and offering separate sses for the tablets well you know it's interesting we actually we've always sort of been somewhat a form factor agnostic in how we do these and if you look at how we're growing into the Jason sees it becomes even more apparent I think at the end of the day are you know from your you know what we really focus on is low power high performance yes and when we do our segmentation analysis and our consumer research obviously would look at the segments and what we see is a lot of consistency in those two areas right for both especially for smartphones and for tablets yeah there there are other things that you have to keep in mind for example the tablets there are some skews you want to just have Wi-Fi only you don't necessarily want wireless LAN although now we see that shifting we see a lot more wireless LAN attached so there's the things like that so we do skews know of the products to address some of those but for the most part we try to build the best SOC best performance best feature set for user experience from music stands experience standpoint and at the lowest power and it's really interesting because as we've started to move into the adjacencies and I'll give you an example in wearables if you go to our wearables display you'll see Snapdragon 400 and a lot of the wearables Android where's is one of the os's that we support yes and you know at first people said really really good yeah but it's not because when you look at it it gets you that really low power but it's incredibly performance oriented in terms of running a really nice high level OS which increasingly especially with Android wears a high level s increasingly wearables is looking like it's shifting in that direction right not and it's not just watches it's the glasses and other types of wearables so you know we're kind of proud of the fact that we have stayed somewhat form factor agnostic but we've been delivering the feature set that allows us to sort of extend into these other adjacent sites i think it's to do with your articulation Balkans philosophy when they make products that you always use for the highest possible pinnacle you can achieve and then you bring down all the building blocks down to lower segments no with value I mean consumers crave the fluid experience no matter what's on the wrist around the face or in the pocket exactly so in terms of a kind of a power thorough put increase from snapdragon 808 hundred you look at the phone like LG g2 which i think a lot of people really love to tell it very well is one of the first to support snapdragon 800 look how big of an improvement are we looking at from going from 800 28 10 yeah you know you have to look at feature to feature so you know we used sort of i'll step back from it it used to be in the old pcs days you just talk about raw in a frequency we just call it speeds and feeds right most consumers these days they don't really care about that so much they want to be fast they don't necessarily equate a gigahertz number too fast right in the term in the case of LTE it has nothing to do with that right baby put your foot right so what we look at is what how are we increasing the feature sets that people care about us so it's things like going from Adreno 420 two or four hundred initially 24 22 for 30 right and it's increasing the graphics capability and there's a lot of ways to measure that right Commissioner by pixel count but we i'd say between 420 430 we're going to get a significant increase in graphics performance right that's important you I gaming or post processing the GPU has a lot to do with your fam processing yeah so all of those things are important for that user experience camera we went from a single ISP then to a duel is P then to a duel is p14 bit well so it's it's sort of hard for me to say it's just a blonde number right x % kappa formal tinkers you can't really quantify you really have to look at what's the user to that experience is camera going to be better yeah because at 14 bit i'm going to be able to support a much larger sensor and i'm going to get a much better experience and if you see what we're doing with even some of our firmware or software packages if you downstairs we're doing and we're partnering with some some some companies to do you know an increase in zoom like I've you ever tried to zoom on a mobile phone it drives you crazy right at a very good experience well that's a problem so we're trying to fix that right so it's those kinds of things that we're looking at we're not just looking at speeds and feeds interesting I mean I'm trying to think of good questions to ask you you know you seem to have a great response for everything so in terms of the market share call come obviously as a commanding lead you know had LTE dominance and a lot of markets for a long time you know look of mature economy like South Korea where they have faster LTE than we have Wi-Fi in the States if you could just throw some kind of prognostications out there for lack of a better term like in the future do you feel as though a smartphone will have a potential to take over the majority the functions that we use the LMT PC or tablet whoo it's interesting you know I heard somebody say this the other day and I thought you know that's very interesting way of looking at it if you look at go back in history and you look at sort of the history of the pc and it used to be years ago you come in and you'd have a desktop though and nobody had a laptop and only people have laptops for maybe five or ten percent of the workforce you know say in the enterprise that traveled right then you know sort of time went by and and the laptop got better and better and over time sort of the cost curve came down so that they were in priority would be with the desktop and eventually that toggled so that eighty to ninety percent of the workforce had a desktop so it was a p was of the the desktop the laptop initially was sort of a companion if you will for certain number of people to the desktop than the desktop one away and then you had your laptop and now increasingly your smartphone is sort of your companion to your laptop but increasingly your smartphone android tablet are starting to get so capable yes that you sort of don't even now need the laptop and I always challenge myself because I'm in the industry now when I travel I travel only with my smartphone or tablet and I try to do everything I want to see the pain points yeah and if I can go back and complain about something get somebody listen to me we get better so you know I'm at the point now when I travel I can pretty much do almost anything I need to do is with maybe the exception of really hardcore productivity no on my phone or my tablet yeah and even the productivity with an external keyboard i can do a metabolite pretty much so you know I see that direction happening the other thing that I think is really interesting is if you look at what's happening in the adjacent markets it's all be driven by the smartphone right if you look at wearables if you look at even automotive in a lot of ways because i think what happened with automotive is people start bringing in their devices into the car all words i give an example and i was look at my kids because they are the future my daughter will get in with her phone and it's her phone she didn't want to lose his phone it's hurtful she will watch in the house movies on her phone sitting in front of the big screen killer joe scream why because no she's going to use the TV why i say yes beats me why because it's mine it's my movie it's my headset I'm in my own little world I want to watch it when she gets in the car she wants to take that with her well of course you know we have DVD player in the car right today she'll take her laptop and with her but there's no Wi-Fi connectivity in my car not you know and no yeah right so unless I've got my phone on a spot it was a hot spot she's watching the DVD player well that's that's not good experience I mean she wants to go in with a movie she wants may be moved the movie to whatever screen is in the car watch it or game and when she gets out she wants to take it with her but see those are the kinds of things that are really interesting and that's driven by mobile because it's that mobile in and around the car that's driving that sort of latent desire by consumers for that kind of seamless experience I wouldn't like to view your carrier bills though that's a different story that's a business model and I think over time you'll see the business model if I had to predict because you know if you look at past history business models change as to adapt and you know I would you know I can't say for certain tea but I would suspect that over time business models village I will judge expensive us consumers very more data yeah so I mean performance of all our devices is excellent you know the cross line even iphone obviously and a lot of the Android devices even at the budget segment sub one hundred dollars it's still pretty experienced today it's pretty remarkable thinking how quickly we've come so welcome as a company you talk about pain points a lot you know and I think that's a really really good sort of outlook you know because then you can find better ways to improve things so should we just kind of expect you know consistent improvement in performance obvious an adherence to low power battery life and then you know in terms of I'm just trying to find the words to what else exactly what else what else is goes back to my previous point about we don't just look at speed the beach we look at features and user experience so I'll give you an example sensors yeah I mean the amount of sensors that are now on this thing and sensor processing and that's only going to increase so then you think about what else you can do with those types of sensors about and it divides a lot of somehow so you're going to get all these use user experiences and these new usage models that we probably can't even dream up today I mean one of the things we've talked about is you know we've looked at in terms of consumer researches in some parts of the world there's a real problem with them you know understanding within a home if there's carbon yeah monoxide or whatever and so you have a sensor for that right and you think you know but in some parts of the world that would be really important thing to feature to have on your phone I like to alert there was talking to someone the other day who has a child he's a type 1 diabetic and just having an alert for when blood sugar gets low right so things like that that we see that are really interesting and it's again not just the phone or the tablet but now as sort of the mobile mobile sort of permeates it's in it's in your connected home it's in your connected car you can have access to any of that anywhere and without necessarily having to go look for a Wi-Fi hotspot so it's not very n810 obviously focusing on the features all the great stuff that you guys do high-performance fast LTE what does service of the rollout of you know more advanced sses in near future are we looking at kind of a slowing down and kind of maturity and focusing more on the high growth areas of emerging markets you know some of the 6 15's and lower the 414 well i think as i described our paradigm is to sort of again design at the top and and waterfall so we cancelled out right because of it no because that that that premium design point is the waterfall for everything else and so if anything I certainly I think the refresh rate is not flowing down people with especially with their smartphones are refreshing we would say every sort of one to two years and then phones themselves tend to sort of get handed off to it you know like I'm done like it gets my cell phone so they were about yoga more happy years yeah but but but it is you know people consumers especially as they see what they don't have they sort of tend to them want more you know first year you're really happy with it and then it's like oh darn it why doesn't do this right so we see that that pace continuing but because we're also looking at these adjacencies that's another thing to think about so you know as we as we design we're going to keep the adjacencies in mind and when those adjacencies grow into you know sort of volume businesses you know those that's opportunity for us to look at doing you know things specifically maybe for that industry so I don't I don't think we're slowing down in the air nobody wants to slow down you know you look at Japan or South Korea people switch phones every six months so if you can kind of get up to that schedule that mean yeah exactly oh very cool well I want to say a huge thank you thank you which creates interest no absolutely interesting what you're doing great continue to push the envelope and deliver great experience for consumers and as always you know we're grateful for your support sounds good thank you very much it okay all right starts look away from CES 2015 hero's welcome signing off