New Delhi

Qualcomm said on October 21, it is bringing technology first developed for its laptop chips to its mobile phone chips, aiming to make them more powerful for generative AI tasks as detailed in a report by Reuters.

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The San Diego-based company is the world's biggest seller of mobile phone chips. In an effort to expand its business, the company in 2021 hired a group of ex-Apple engineers to help it design laptop chips, which went on sale this year and are helping power artificial intelligence (AI) features in Microsoft's Windows.

Brief history of Qualcomm

Qualcomm is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software, and services related to wireless technology. It owns patents critical to the 5G, 4G, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA and WCDMA mobile communications standards.

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Qualcomm was established in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and six other co-founders. Its early research into CDMA wireless cell phone technology was funded by selling a two-way mobile digital satellite communications system known as Omnitracs.

After a heated debate in the wireless industry, CDMA was adopted as a 2G standard in North America with Qualcomm's patents incorporated. Afterwards, there was a series of legal disputes about pricing for licensing patents required by the standard.

Over the years, Qualcomm has expanded into selling semiconductor products in a predominantly fabless manufacturing model. It also developed semiconductor components or software for vehicles, watches, laptops, wi-fi, smartphones, and other devices.

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Impact of the new technology developed

The Reuters report further detailed that, now, the technology developed by that team - a set of custom computing technology Qualcomm has branded "Oryon" - is being put into the company's mobile phone chips for the first time.

The company has also reworked the parts of the chip, which is called the Snapdragon 8 Elite, to handle tasks such as generating images and text. Qualcomm will offer software developers special tools beyond the ones already available in Alphabet's Android operating system to tap into those parts of the chip.

"AI has been one of those where I think Google is moving fast, but we have our own technology to offer that end developer," Chris Patrick, Qualcomm's senior vice president and general manager for mobile handsets, discussed with Reuters. Qualcomm said Samsung Electronics, Asustek Computer and Xiaomi, among several others, will use the new chip.