Qualcomm bets on inferencing in the cloud, which Arm says can’t run it all it forever

Qualcomm and Arm have offered differing predictions regarding the market for inferencing silicon.

Both companies announced quarterly results on Wednesday and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon used his company’s earnings call to add a little more color to last week’s news that his company will enter the datacenter market with chips designed to run inferencing workloads while using less energy than required by rivals’ hardware.

Amon said Qualcomm is building a system on chip and a “card” for its forthcoming inferencing hardware, because “AI data center growth is moving from training to dedicated inference workloads, and this trend is expected to accelerate in the coming years.”

Arm CEO Renee Haas agreed that energy consumption is a “bottleneck” in the datacenter, and that demand will shift from training to inference.

But he thinks some of the action will move outside bit barns.

“What we're seeing is all kinds of ...