Ampere, Qualcomm to Develop Energy-Efficient AI Chips 

Ampere computing announced on Thursday its collaboration with Qualcomm aimed at reducing costs related to energy consumption of AI chips operations. 

Founded by Renee James, a former Intel president, Ampere is specialized in the creation of central processing units (CPUs) that are energy-efficient using technology from Arm Holdings. Ampere’s central processing units (CPUs) are generally used by major companies, such as Oracle, Google, and others. 

 The Santa-Clara based company focuses on the production of chips that consume less power compared to leaders in the chip making industry, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). 

Qualcomm, the dominant mobile phone chips manufacturer, has been making efforts since 2019 to enter the AI chip market for data centers, with a focus on using its own energy-efficient solutions. 

The partnership between the two companies has resulted in the integration of the chips of each of them into a single data center server. 

Jeff Wittich, Ampere’s chief product officer, believes that the collaboration with Qualcomm could lead to larger projects that go beyond just server-level solutions. He also emphasized that both companies are addressing similar issues. 

From his part, Jim McGregor, founder of Tirias Research, sees that Qualcomm and Ampere are not directly competing Nvidia, the AI chip leader, since its chips are usually used for training AI systems with large datasets. While servers designed by both partners are used to operate models after being trained. 

In addition to the partnership, the mobile phone chips manufacturer unveiled the next generation of its CPU, which will feature 256 processing cores, an increase from the current 192 cores. This new chip will be manufactured with the use of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s advanced 3-nanometer process (TSMC). 

The partnership between Ampere Computing and Qualcomm represents a major step forward in developing more energy efficient AI chip solutions, putting both companies in a position that enables them to compete in the data center market. 

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