Cristiano Amon: Qualcomm CEO | Lex Fridman Podcast #280
talking about an exciting thing for an engineer the same snapdragon that goes to a phone and it can go to a galaxy phone for example samsung the same not a special one went all the way to mars you expect to have a full day of battery life but then you wanted to not be sending data into 10 or 100 megabits you want gigabits you wanted to be able to have eight core processors you want to have a gpu with ray tracing you want to have all of those things that you can only get into sometimes a desktop pc to do all of that in your phone is an incredible thing some people raise concerns about there not being enough studies about the effects of 5g on the human body is 5g safe the following is a conversation with cristiano amman the ceo of qualcomm the company that's one of the leaders in the world in the space of mobile communication and computation that's 2g 3g 4g and 5g that connects billions of phones and the snapdragon processor and system on a chip that is the brain of most of the premium android phones in the world this is a lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's cristiano amman you are originally from brazil so let me ask the most important question the most profound question the biggest question who's the greatest football soccer player of all time look everybody's going to say pele and actually uh i was born at the during the game of brazil and italy that play gave to brazil the championship actually it was my dad tells me that the doctor had a tv on at the delivery room but so everybody will say play but i really like ronaldo the first um oh the first ronaldo i really like him that's my favorite player by the way not everybody would say pillay yes but we should we shall leave that on the table and uh agreed to disagree brazilians will say billy yes there's other countries uh around that region absolutely disagree a little bit very aware qualcomm is largely responsible for 5g and some of the greatest processors in our smartphones ever built so we got communication and computation tech that impacts probably billions of people so if you zoom out use a human we look at humans on earth in general does it blow your mind that we have these billions of smartphones communicating and each of them have the computational power you know you talk about 10 billion transistors that's a million times more than 50 years ago in the best computers in the world like if you just zoom out as a human does that blow your mind absolutely look one of the reasons i think i love this company is the we know that the technology would develop can change the world and i'll tell you one more thing beyond the amount of processing power that you have now in the palm of your hands and being everyone in the world is connected with broadband technology the smartphone is also mankind largest development platform there's nothing like it so you respect both the hardware and the software both both if aliens were observing earth over the past 50 to 70 years how do you think they would describe this particular uh turmoil fun things going on on the surface of this particular little planet we live in interesting times uh at in one time we see incredible development of technology for mankind just what happened in the last century uh you know the night from 1900 to the uh 2000 it was incredible development just look 2012 years ago how far we're coming and where are we going with technology it's incredible what do you think they would notice so there's road networks there's all kinds of networks there's uh there's lights that keep popping up cities bringing up like from an alien perspective you're observing what i'm going to tell you is you have this contrast of incredible development of technology but then you see some of the things that are happening right now which is probably you would not expect them to happen uh on the 21st century just what happened in in ukraine so i think uh that that will be a more puzzling question for the aliens i would imagine the new technology is kind of impressive actually that might not be so puzzling because that's just human nature revealing itself as it has throughout human history that's correct let's talk about wireless communication so qualcomm was instrumental in developing 5g now you were with qualcomm since the early days the good old 90s with the 2g but what is 5g including sub 6 gigahertz 5g and millimeter wave 5g how does it work and maybe the most important question is how will it change the world in the coming years when we set ourselves to develop 5g and you know we look at this every generation of technology had a problem to be solved right so you mentioned 2g to g challenge the challenge of cdma was can we give every person on earth a cell phone that was can you get to a technology that you can basically allow everyone to have a mobile phone 3g was about the ability to connect that to the internet i think 4g was broadband and with 4g was about have the ability for you to have a computer in the palm of your hand we just talked about that 5g the challenge was a little bit different is how do we build a technology for a society that is going to be 100 connected to the cloud how do we provide the technology that is going to be the last mile connectivity for everything so 5g has it's basically been designed to eliminate all issues with data congestion whether you are in into stadium we talk about soccer you're in a stadium and everyone should be ability to have access to broadband so deal with congestion deal with the fact that not only people but billions of things need to be connected create a technology that for the first time in wireless you could deliver mission critical services wireless used to up to 4g is its best effort in 5g it can guarantee that you're connected with the cloud and then the last point of that is provide this fabric that will allow us as a society to look at things that are not connected and say that's the exception that's why we made uh comparison in the early days of 5g that that's going to be like electricity right now you don't have a discussion about what is the use cases for electricity you don't talk about that anymore you just assume it's there and that's how we're thinking about everything connected to the cloud that's what 5g is and that's the role of 5g so first of all everything connected to the cloud is interesting because the space of everything is constantly increasing that isn't correct you know i don't think the refrigerator over there it looks kind of smart but i don't think it's connected yet uh to the cloud so this includes internet of things what is the full space of everything the full space of everything is it's uh maybe going back to where you start defining qualcomm qualcomm is about communications and advanced computers for low power devices and can we make everything smart you know it can range from the robot you have right now on the floor to your refrigerator to to a camera to uh you know machines in manufacturing uh to retail etc i i can give you some examples when when we think of something as simple as going to to the grocery shop we see technology now with something that's the stuff we've been working with companies like walmart electronic shelf labels the ability for you to have smart cameras they can look at shelves and can the camera is smart enough to say some product needs to be replenished ability to see with stress so it's about really providing processor connectivity artificial intelligence to everything and i think that's one of the largest addressable markets we have for technology because you can't really define everything right exactly it's a nice market because it keeps growing potentially exponentially in speed um what about coverage so how are we doing on the everything part so you know there is like i mentioned sub six gigahertz 5g and there's a millimeter wave 5g so not all 5g is made the same so there's a speed there's a bandwidth thing and then there's coverage how many people get to enjoy today and how does the progress in the next 5 10 20 30 50 years you think looks like in terms of coverage great topic conversation so let's talk about this when i meet with regulators across the globe i i tell them resistance is futile allocate every spectrum to wireless every spectrum needs to be allocated to wireless the reality is when we start moving from cdma to ofdma we knew that there's this industry has done a lot to get more bits per hertz but the reality is uh the massive amount of improvements that is required in capacity and in speed uh you need more spectrum you know there's there's not so much we can rely on more bits per hertz you just need more spectrum and if you look for example what carriers since the 2g era they participate in different license and auctions and every spectrum they accumulated from 2g or 3g or 4g all of that you may be able to get one or two channels max of sub six uh which is a channel is about 100 megahertz or 200 megahertz and that's it so we we need more spectrum so 5g has been designed to work across every spectrum from the low frequency bands that's we call the sub six but you needed more you needed to go to the millimeter wave so that's why five 5g is a technology that you can deploy from 450 megahertz as an example or 600 or 700 all the way to in the 42 gigahertz and that's where millimeter wave comes into the picture now let's now connect this to your question about coverage uh of 5g the easiest thing to do uh is to deploy 5g in the new spectrum you can get uh which is uh in the sub 6 you see bands being auctioned across the globe into 3.5 gigahertz there's nothing special about the band is this the only one that was available because everything else being used for 4g and you can deploy on that go into existing cell towers and just put a new equipment without having to build new towers but when we go to technology such as millimeter wave then you have to build more dense networks you need to build more stations because the deployment in that case look like a wi-fi deployment it's almost like wi-fi access points when you need to build more stations you need permits you need to build fiber so it takes more time to densify so what you see happening is coverage has been built fast with subjects uh across the globe now the united states also have the sub-six uh so that gets you the coverage very fast but millimeter wave it's moving and uh if you i will say for example verizon the united states has had a leadership uh in building millimeter wave it takes time i'll say cities like chicago manhattan starting to get coverage it will be a process over a number of years as you build those different access points type networks but it's inevitable there there's not enough spectrum so every 5g operators just a matter of time we'll have millimeter wave as well resistance is futile okay so uh for millimeter wave we need density of access points and what's the biggest resistance for qualcomm for human civilization is it uh politicians regulators federal regulators is it uh individual humans is it's not enough money from the consumer perspective like what who is the biggest pain in the butt from a qualcomm standpoint but answering the question about what it takes to build all this technology i think regulators across the board understood the importance of 5g i have not met a regulator that said it's really important to be late on 5g i don't think anybody wants to be late on 5g and as a result we've seen enormous amount of progress in getting spectrum allocated to 5g i think the real issue is the time that it takes to build infrastructure you know investment in 5g infrastructure special millimeter wave is like building roads and ports it's critical infrastructure and those things take time like one of the number one obstacle you're going to hear from operators is psy permit you know sometimes they have to negotiate municipality by municipality about permits to get new cell sites but you know the networks will be densified and and you're going to need all of the capacity for the promise of the fully immersive augmented reality that will replace phones and everything being connected 100 of the time this would not be a conversation with the ceo if i did not ask questions that make you nervous some people raise concerns about there not being enough studies about the effects of 5g on the human body is 5g safe look uh i have a very simple answer uh to to to this question as we built new capabilities such as 5g power is going down especially when you think about reducing the number of base stations the network's becoming more dense so as you do that the the power becomes lower if you're radiated from power radiated from the phone and from the tower as you get closer to the tower you don't need that much power to reach the tower so as as we move from 4g to 5g i think we see a reduction in the amount of powers required to close the radio link now also you have a number of organizations the fcc for example has rigorous programs which they do a lot of tests uh to validate uh you know the safety of those devices and i think we have has been a model for other countries also to adopt the same things uh cellular has been around for a number of decades now uh i think smartphone is our most beloved device uh today and i i would argue how it's difficult to answer those questions because you yeah but i'll argue that the data to date have we seen in 3g and 4g you know has shown that a lot of the initial concerns we're not valid we look at 5g even though it's new it's just less power so we look at from from a physics standpoint so from a physics from a biology perspective there's a lot of evidence there's studies that show that it's not dangerous that it is in fact safe however the concern that people have is when you scale technology exponentially how would that change human civilization i mean that doesn't apply to 5g that applies to every technology how you said smartphone is the most beloved device but love sometimes hurts that's uh the impact on society we don't know and there's a little bit of fear there's both excitement and fear it's a great topic a conversation actually so so let me give you my perspective on this and you started to see something exactly happening right now so let me step back and let's talk about the fact that we are in a fully interconnected society that when when uh when you look of the situation today we talk about smartphones uh largest uh development platform uh so much now of our life uh we are connected to the smartphone and as a result and we are all connected and we're connected and then we're building digital twins of everything right so so when you look at that picture when you look at the picture of this connected society you started to have the following thoughts which i think are very healthy which means in the same way that in the physical world you're entitled to some rights you have obligations and there's a lot of uh things that protect your your integrity i think as a rule we're gonna see the society evolving so those things extend to your digital being of people and things and i think just natural it's just natural it's just a natural path and you started to see things like that for example the europeans has done a lot in this area i'll say the europeans probably ahead in the united states and thinking about privacy laws digital privacy's law most recent the dma the digital markets act which i think is a great thing i think we're we believe there's incredible uh thought in to enable ability to regulate the digital markets so that there's innovation and competitions and not not a single company uh can control all the data and then decide you know uh how things gonna be work on the digital realm and even if we think about the potential of things like the meta versus we're connecting physical and digital spaces so i think it's a natural evolution of course regulate regulation and laws always follow technology but but the fact that we're uh moving to our interconnected society there's there's no going back uh we are a fully interconnected society but there is opportunity uh to think about how the digital to win uh should peop people and government should think about it so that we get the best of a technology we doubt that any downside yeah so when you say digital twin that's one of the other things you're excited about which is the metaverse are basically building worlds in the in the digital space and you have to start to think about all the basic human rights that transfer from our physical meat vehicles out to the digital copies of ourselves representations of ourselves it's really important to think about the thing you mentioned about regulators that has been this is me speaking frustrating is like you said they follow technology so sometimes they don't get the technology at all so they're very clumsy in writing laws that censor that technology in interesting ways they mean good but they can do a lot of unintended damage now both it's a dance it's a beautiful dance but i just wish governments were better dance partners i just see what they're kind of writing now about regulating social media and platforms like youtube and it's just really really clumsy they don't understand how machine learning works how recommender systems work and i just wish they kind of caught up a little more because it's really important to be great at regulation but also it's important to let companies flourish and embrace this new wave of technology that that weird dance i am more and more learning looking at public public policy how much positive government can do and how much clumsy negative it can do unintentionally just out of sheer incompetence or lack of curiosity about tech that's my rant about regulators i think it's a valid point as i said before i think the europeans probably have a very good framework but you know the way the way i'll oh think about it we we depend on have the ability to innovate we depend on the free markets we depend on the ability to create uh you know technology that uh that would be disruptive but at some time i think the tech companies probably should spend time helping governments understand helping understand ahead of time so that they can be better prepared let's talk about one of my favorite topics snapdragon so snapdragon is a system on a chip this processor has probably powered billions of smartphones over its pretty long history now a decade and a half maybe so it's constantly iterating there's constantly just like a turmoil of beautiful innovations happening so last year was snapdragon 88 was the main one with the 5 nanometer and this year it's snapdragon 8 gen 1. it's a new naming scheme okay what's the sexiest most beautiful idea or concept to you about snapdragon start there the way i would describe it and i think the reason we have been uh successful with it is to really understand uh how how to build a platform a single chip like a single chip uh that will have every single capability if you want to make this smartphone in the palm of your hand you know uh something that has all of their computing needs and it was the ability to get from an engineering standpoint ability to get into a single chip of not only all possible connectivity technology from cell alert wi-fi to bluetooth to every single constellation of satellite for position location but at the same time you know a very power efficient uh you know single thread and multi-threaded cpu a gpu for your uh all of your graphic demands gaming fastest growing segment for gaming is uh mobile gaming an artificial intelligence processor which we call the neural processor unit and then a video engine uh and a multimedia engine for every single application audio everything so it's a single chip that has every single computing technology you need in the phone and what's exciting about it is what we already knew for example when you think about camera or computer vision you see that advancements in this technology now happens in the smartphone first versus traditional camera so the beauty about the snapdragon is we always have this thing with within qualcomm the phone it's small you have to be able to hold it you're going to touch your face so you cannot be hot uh you have to manage thermals you expect to have a full day of battery life but then you want it to not be sending data into uh 10 or 100 megabits you want gigabits you wanted to be able to have eight core processors you want to have a gpu with ray tracing you want to have all those things that you can only get into sometimes a desktop pc and to do all of that in your phone and be able to be in the leadership position generation after generation is an incredible thing and we're very proud of that at qualcomm yeah so you have to do the wi-fi 5g all the and you have to be good to everyone all of those technologies pack it all in and there's also pressure to make the thing faster and faster and faster and then there's more and more applications you're supposed to be effortlessly using and then you you mentioned the npu gpu cpu they have to also dance together somehow they have to communicate well share memory or not depending on what the application is and your battery has to last all day [Laughter] so think about that from a company qualcomm we have to be good and each and every one of those technology we can just say oh we're a cpu company or a gpu company or we're ai company we have to do everything what does it take to design a great processor so design this system on a chip that you mentioned is there some insight you can provide in this chaos of engineers designers leaders uh you know the people that think about how much this is all gonna cost all the whole mess of it i'm of course very partial about it i've been in this company for probably more than 26 years but um i argued that there are a couple things that are ingredients for the success so we talk about the fact that you have all those different technologies they evolve at their own pace and you have to be good in each one of them and you need to then to make them working together so so you need to have an engineering organization that with a incredible collaboration culture because everybody has to be working the train is going to leave the station every car it needs to be there right when it leaves the station it needs to live on time especially in the phone business you can change christmas you cannot change black friday you cannot change all of the selling season so the phones are going to launch on time and every technology needs to be there the engineer needs to work as one and we do have that at qualcomm the other thing you have to have incredible discipline because you know those are very complex systems so in one way you have to design with quality uh because in many cases we're going to be ramping production and even before we have the silicon back and you have to rely on on runner simulation models and you have to rely on on the fact that you design uh for commercial applications that takes that takes a while to build and uh and you know it's probably been the history of a semiconductor business at qualcomm so you mean like the framework of how many people can use simulation software and all that kind of stuff to build the thing with a hard deadline that you might not even get back from like manufacture before you're not allowed to have any mistakes no wonder our name is quality communications oh i never even thought about the qual part quality so quality and there's a bar that's high and you're not allowed to mess up i mean to me as an engineer that's exciting hard deadlines no room for mistakes i love it super stressful but i love it so there's a couple of other small companies called google and apple so google is now using its own chip for the pixel 6. apple using is its own how does qualcomm out-compete google and apple how does it beat them we don't have to out compete google actually if you look at our mobile strategy today and then one thing i was very clear when i became ceo i think there's a lot of confusion on the market our mobile strategy is very clear we are focused of making snapdragon synonymous with premium android experience that's what snapdragon is android the phone of the people yes i just have a love for android no i'm constantly talking trash to iphone people sorry go ahead premium android experiences so we do pre we do produce snapdragon multiple tier for every price point but you know every year you mentioned the hn1 and every year we provide you know the flagship product and then and then the other series that is trying to get the best of every possible technology at that time and it's really focused on enabling the android ecosystem so i'll give an example so you ask me the question how to compete with google it's not about competing with google we're the number one enabler of the google android ecosystem and uh the largest largest the number one customer there is actually samsung and if you look what happened to samsung samsung um i always had since i i began my began my relationship with them that because they always had their own chip they always had their own chip and um and if you'll just look at what happened right now with the galaxy s22 that just launched you know they used to balance their their business about 50 qualcomm they will get the most advanced markets like the united states and china and japan and korea they will sign a qualcomm and then they have their own chip for the markets that they would will be like more emerging markets open markets markets that they have a control on the channel because they sell a lot of appliances and other things if you look what happened right now gs22 uh 75 uh is qualcomm and uh and then the next large oems and android system are the chinese ones companies like xiaomi one of the fastest growing uh it was number one in europe at some point last year then followed by oppo and oneplus and vivo so those are some of the largest qualcon customers and uh and they actually drive the android ecosystem and that's our mobile strategy and fully align with google and uh and it's working and i was you know i'm not to get into a lot of the uh investor conversation but we're also happy we became in a beneficiary of the shifts that we saw in the marketplace as huawei became a smaller oem as a result of the sanctions we saw the rise of a lot of the other oems from china especially for china domestic market xiaomi oppo vivo they moved to the premium category and they're all doing that with qualcomm so we're actually very fortunate and happy with the position we are in mobile business we do have an apple relationship we provide modem technology to apple to multi-year relationship apple has been very public that they are uh investing to develop their own modem uh but the qualcomm strategy has has been clear you know we really focus on snapdragon you know not our mobile strategy is not defined by providing a cellular modem to apple or mobile strategies this that we just talked about it is about the unique thing of snapdragon that has every single technology integrated into a single soc and uh it provides a premium experience and that's what we're doing and uh focusing on the android ecosystem i don't know if i can ask you this kind of question it's like picking your children or something like this but what smartphone with the snapdragon you mentioned samsung galaxy s22 oneplus those are phones i personally really enjoy what phone do you currently use or do you have multiple phones you just i do have multiple phones but i do use uh galaxy s22 that's your favorite one all right well you heard it here first folks okay so excellent can qualcomm also let's take a brief step away from mobile and take on intel and apple and other such companies in the laptop and desktop space so the nature of what a computer is seems to be changing it's like smartphones like merging it's all being a smartphone just with a bigger screen or something like this so what does the future of that look like before i answer that question let me just step back a little bit because and i'm sure we can we can talk more about those things but the the reality is qualcomm is changing a lot and we use i know we spend a lot of time talking about 5g and smartphone and snapdragon and i think that has been what had defined qualcomm for many years but the reality is even consistent with that 5g conversation which is a technology to connect everything qualcomm is also changing our technology that was in many cases designed for phones and we said at the beginning connectivity and processing is going to virtually every industry and as a result qualcomm is really changing with it and expanding to a number of different addressable markets some of those markets is is the pc as you talk about it the the conversions of mobile and pc and the reason i'm excited about this because you see a lot of things happening that bring this right front and center when you think about the future technology so what we learn with the pandemic is that the number one use case of personal computers is communications it is interesting when you think about that that's the number one use case on a pc today is communications it's actually funny because in the cellular industry actually i'll say let me step back in the telecom industry we've been chasing this killer application of video telephony for decades right i remember back then in the wire line uh even before the internet and ip isdn you remember those uh att desk phones with a little screen and they said you can do video telephony we don't watch that uh in uh back to the future too then when we started developing 3g said people said what's the application for having data to cell phone all video telephony then we started doing 4g and in the beginning people said well why do you need all this broadband oh vega telephony but it took a pandemic to make video telephony the killer application and that's now the number one uh use case on a pc so now think about that for a second personal computers now their technologies that people when they're going to buy a pc they didn't care much about it now they do camera camera how good is the camera the audio is they connected how good is the connectivity do you have the latest and greatest wi-fi in cellular what's the battery life because you're going to be working from anywhere sometimes you near that sometimes you're not so all those things what's the portability like so those things started to change how we should think about the pc but i won't stop there let me talk about another trend so and it and all come as a result of what we saw the pandemic let's say that you are you're an engineer in the computer aided design you you have advanced uh desktop computer or workstation in your office but you want to work from home someday so you're not going to move that to your home so what do you need to do you're going to have to rely on that you're going to run that on the cloud and you're going to run out of the cloud you need high bandwidth because you almost wanted the cloud to be the same as your computer for that use case that's the 5g on demand computing use case the us5g is almost a link between two computers but then you know cios are saying well my workforce is going home for certain days i want all the data to be in the cloud you look at for example microsoft onedrive or the ability to collaborate you need the bandwidth so that when you put all of those things together you start thinking about what is the next generation pc and that's the opportunity for qualcomm i'll just give an example uh back in uh mobile congress uh recently lenovo they have a line of uh of uh enterprise laptops called the thinkpad i'm sure you're familiar with it so they announced the thinkpad based on snapdragon with 5g on 28 hours of battery life oh wow so so that's next generation it's just a nice screen with extremely high nice screen and keyboard uh and extremely high connectivity to maybe an even more like a more powerful machine in the cloud something more of the data connecting to the data containing compute all that kind of stuff you have the camera capabilities and let me go uh one step more microsoft talking about some of the features they're doing now using on windows 11 using snapdragon remember we talked about a snapdragon has an ai processor inside there so one of the cool features microsoft's talking about it is you can be on a teams call and you can make sure your eyes are looking at the camera uh 100 of the time well that's an interesting so they can be talking with ai yes that's really tricky to pull off for example the reason i'm a huge stickler for doing these in person these conversations in person it's really tough to get right but it's a worthy challenge so that's where the metaverse hopes to so like i just because you said the importance of this telephony of humans connecting teleporting themselves getting that right is really difficult because a lot of people hate zoom meetings but that doesn't mean you can't improve that experience and get rid of the hate a lot of people hate talking to their car too because the voice the natural language processing is terrible but when it's not it's a beautiful thing so getting that right is this is an opportunity this is an opportunity think about it it starts with the pc making the pc giving you a better experience for teams but then it goes right back into this trend of connecting physical and digital spaces and all the work we're doing with the metaverse and virtual reality materiality in the future is why not call somebody or connect with somebody with a hologram it's possible and also to mention some increasing amount of intelligence in our cars so semi-autonomous autonomous cars and the interactivity between human and and car which are for me things are really exciting let me ask you a big question so when when aliens again now on the other side right and humans destroy themselves through nuclear war centuries from now let's hope not let's hope not but in case you know there's just hypothetical thought experiment and they write a history of humanity in the 21st century uh what would they remember qualcomm in the 21st century as a company would be a car company would it be like think of all the crazy pivots that might happen the next like 50 years because you're thinking you said qualcomm enables all of these things with 5g and there'll be probably other g's it keeps increasing so basically connectivity and computation and everything becomes connected and everything is capable of computation might you be become a robotics and car company um i will argue we're already an automotive uh company today and uh but let me tell what i what i would like qualcomm to be remember recognized for i think everyone that knows qualcomm immediately you know connect us pun intended to connectivity and wireless but the reality is we're being actually the company providing intelligence and and processing to everything on the edge everything outside the data center that we're doing those billions of devices they're going to be connected and and that's kind of explained when we talk about the connected intelligent edge the beyond phones cars pcs and all of those and the broader iot as we talk about everything will be connected and intelligent and that's what we want qualcomm to be recognized for so by the way for people who are not familiar there's some technical jargon but people use the word edge like edge computing it's by the way that's probably changing what that even means but it's basically everything that's not a giant thing that's making a lot of noise in a building somewhere so it's mobile devices and the uh mobile devices of all kinds of well refrigerators not mobile but it would be edge so it's it's like what's a sandwich that kind of discussion um but basically edge computing is is uh the edge of that expanding space that you mentioned that qualcomm is trying to connect and enable with computation here's a simple way to describe what the edge is in edge computing is i think as we think about the evolution of the data center you need to bring the computational closer to where the device is also when you put the computation together with the connectivity at the same time you're going to see a lot of advancement of artificial intelligence happening closer to or at the device look it's a very i i have a simple way to describe it remember in the beginning of this conversation we talk about in the 4g era broadband and mobile computing evolve side by side if you're going to have broadband you might as well have a computer in the palm of your hand so we needed to invest in those two technologies in 5g ai develops side by side you're connected to the cloud 100 of the time you have a high bandwidth and you have now a smart and intelligent thing that can make decision in real time provide context information to the cloud to make the models more accurate and as well compare and contrast with the cloud so there's going to be an exponential development ai happening with all the edge devices the devices that are outside the data center and computation is going to go alongside that and a great example that's the car um the car you know uh we haven't talked much about the car but you know qualcomm is now uh you could argue with as much as an automotive company as wireless company working 26 global brands and it's easy to see if you look at our mobile heritage and we talk about form factors thermal battery life you're not going to put a server in the trunk of a car but you need as much computational capabilities and that's we see qualcomm providing you know as the car become a connected computer on wheels we provide the computational and all the sensors for you to do assist the driving for the new digital cockpit experience connecting the car to the cloud and it's all that's happening at the end does qualcomm want to be the brain of a lot of autonomous vehicles in the future of different you said brands like mercedes-benz i don't know whatever just whatever car you know cars have the the sexy thing they do and then it defines their brand and so so on and then there's the brain that doesn't need to have branding supposed you know so does qualcomm see that or will i be able to buy a qualcomm car like literally no you're not going to be able to buy a qualcomm car but we already we're already uh on our way to become you know the brains of the car the way you should think about qualcomm automotive strategy is the car companies realize they need to become technology companies you just look for example of the market cap of some of the new uh electrical comers and compare them with with the legacy uh car companies which one is that i i heard of this well let's just use like one of them lives in austin let's say rivien right uh rivien oh that one too yes you know the car companies are not going away it's actually a mistake not to bet in the car companies huh the core companies need a technology partner uh they will provide the digital chassis for them and that's what we're doing so if you look at qualcomm we talk about a snapdragon digital chassis so we want to be the preferred technology partner of the car companies and i think it's working strategy is working right now so basically helping companies the car companies accelerating to this into becoming technology companies connecting the car to the cloud redesign the interior of the digital cockpit experience and provide the computation and sensor capabilities for autonomy and assisted driving on the topic of robots when millions or billions of robots roam the earth in the future among us humans and i am for one concerned in a small percentage but largely i'm excited about that future will qualcomm be uh the thing that powers their brain we have an in our iot business which has been one of the fastest growing business for us um a number of robotics engagement so i'll give you some example and if you look of the amazon astro you familiar with that there's two uh there's two snapdragon in there um there is this is really exciting they're supposed to ship it to me where is it okay but anyway that's really cool i didn't know it was snapdragons yeah we we're working with robotics in industrial uh of course drones you know we're getting uh more and more traction for robotics started to interrupt industrial robotics too you said that's true uh especially when you think about um what's going to happen with the factory of the future the industrial side of the future the warehouse of the future when you bring 5g for example to it and you have a number of different use cases and in and and then you see a lot of robotics application and and of course drones and the most famous uh i will consider that a robot the most famous uh robot in the world right now it's powered by snapdragon which is the mars ingenuity helicopter the whole helicopter the cameras and everything is powered by snapdragon and talking about an exciting thing for an engineer the same snapdragon that goes to a phone and it can go to a galaxy phone for example samsung the same not a special one went all the way to mars is exploring other planets looking for alien life and maybe he gets to meet him wouldn't that be interesting if a snapdragon is the thing that first sees an alien it's like what the hell we did not program this in the computer vision i want to use the example to go back to the conversation we had about quality uh as an engineer you need to make sure it works can you imagine if it gets over there in mars and it doesn't work listen this is very stressful what what nasa with spacex what all those companies are doing is extremely stressful the room for mistakes is is tiny but that's super exciting for an engineer once again um there's been a global semiconductor chip shortage so from your perspective just to be interesting to get your expert analysis of the situation what do you think are the main reasons and how is qualcomm being affected and how can it help in this in in the future things like it okay that's a that's a a big topic of conversation and we only have five minutes so i'll try i'll try to be as objective as i can so first let's talk about what caused it and and i you know you hear a lot of different things i will try to put it within the right context the first thing that caused it really is the acceleration of digital transformation of pretty much everything in every industry uh every industry has been digitally transformed and as such the amount of semiconductors that are required it's much larger just to give you a practical example if you think about the automotive as an example the cars that are you there's cars there launch a new model launching today the new model launching today most likely has 10x the amount of chips off the prior model and the model is people working on this coming in next probably 10x that one so you see the amount of silicon and then billions of things become smart more and more data goes to the cloud the data center grows so the floor for semiconductor consumptions went up by a lot then you have things that aggravated this the pandemic aggravated this there's a couple trends from the pandemic the enterprise transformation of the home the home became an enterprise massive amount of upgrades on broadband and iot the office uh has changed to the way we work now uh in including the ability to support collaboration tools and video then you have uh the higher demand for for products doing the pandemic because people wanted to be connected people bought new phones and new tablets and new computers uh new gaming so all of those things came on top of that as the aggravated issue but they're not the main issue the main issue is it's actually a a long-term growth of digital so what i'm hearing you say is the pandemic was not the cause it was an aggravation it's an aggravation so is there a way we can support as a human civilization in terms of manufacture in terms of supply the kind of growth that you're talking about in devices and so on is there high level ideas you can say of what that's required there yes and i think that's uh the second part of the answer so what's happening now how are we going to get out of this so we see a lot of capacity investments put into place by the industry you know we had invested a lot with our suppliers a lot of the suppliers uh had made uh plans about you know increasing the capacity the industry is planning to double its total semiconductor manufacturing capacity within the next uh five years an example so that's already happening and then you see things which are actually good they're good uh the initiatives such as the united states chips act and now the european chips act the united states uh chip sacks about uh 52 billion dollars the europeans about 43. their goal combined is to get at least 50 percent of the consumption uh with manufacturing installed within the us and european geographies and that's also very good that's yet another uh incentive for more manufacturing capacity to be built and to be built with a geographic distributed way which that's how you play in supply chain so those those i think are good things so if anything we learn through the crisis is the semiconductor uh it's important my conductor companies are important and we need to invest in semiconductors returning to the grilling of the ceo with the hard questions this is almost for my own education of the space you mentioned regulators qualcomm paid out and received payment of billions of dollars in settlement and fines uh there seems to be a lot of huge lawsuits in this space how do you explain that uh does uh does this get in the way of innovation or does it promote it i will rephrase it by saying they used to be a lot of lawsuits in the space in addition of of what we do in semiconductors you know our processors and our modems the snapdragon platform we also have a licensing business which has been a part of the company since the beginning as the largest uh inventors of the essential technology in 2g cdma 3g 4g and 5g uh you know and qualcomm contribute that to the standards so we always had this model that rather than invent the technology and be the only one producing the products we licensed so everyone can produce it and uh and as such we receive intellectual property uh for these standard essential patents um as part of our past dispute with apple that's behind us now you're friends now they're they're they're my customers um and and uh as part of that i think the the licensing model got tested in i think in every geography and uh we succeeded in every single geography to validate the pro-competitiveness of this model i think the uh the fair reasonable non-discriminatory aspect of this model and i would argue that besides being the most successful licensing business to date in the industry probably the one that's been battle tested and that's most stable because there's not a single jurisdiction that we have not had to validate that model so it's part of our past and what it creates is probably create a lot of stability in our licensing business but having said that the growth of the company is in the semiconductor space and the semiconductor so licensing is you come up with a pretty good idea you have a bunch of smart people coming up with cool ideas and then once you come up with that idea you sell that idea to others they get to use it that's essentially a license the license revenue we have is is for the what we call the scp standard essential patents that are part of uh the 2g 3g 4g and 5g standards so if you want to build anything with 5g you need to get a license from qualcomm because users qualcomm essential technology is part of the standard and a slightly different model or a lot different model the semiconductor is you design you inject a bunch of fascinating ideas how to build the snapdragon and then there's because it's a fabulous company you have somebody build the the the chip and it goes into a phone with the branding and all that kind of stuff and and that has less kind of players involved it's not a license we sell the product in the semi we don't license semiconductor technology we build products and we sell products this is your first year as a ceo no not one year yet not one year yet yeah let's hope it'll be in june it'll be one year okay this is a a company that's involved with a lot of fascinating technologies and it's touching the lives of billions of people a lot of complicated stuff because like i said licensing technologies you have to collaborate with manufacturers you have to then work with however many you said car companies and all these clients and so on and you have to uh you know with with tech companies uh apple and so on what's that like what lessons have you learned about leadership and maybe about yourself as a human being from this first uh almost a year soon to be a year as a ceo of this incredible this complex this large company oh that's a loaded question let me let me answer in reverse order um first thing that i learned and i i think is probably common uh across ceos especially uh in our industry is it will be great if i had more time i think there's especially because we're growing so many areas and there's so many things to learn so many uh relationships to build um time to spend with a number of different technologies and and but it kind of reflects really the size of the opportunity that exist for qualcomm qualcomm it is really growing in a number of different directions all at the same time and uh so it did got busier um and uh part of this is because i'm spending a lot of time understanding the new industries we're going in and building uh relationships second thing which is a lot to do with how i think about things and a little bit of my personality at the end of the day business partnership is really done by people and i think the importance of having trusted relationships for the long term uh is extremely important and i've been dedicated to do that as ceo we're not a company that plays for the short term we don't and when we build new partnerships we expect that to be for decades and uh so i i spend time doing that and i think that's important for qualcomm the other part of your question is we do have a lot of opportunities in all different areas what we like and i've been fortunate enough to become ceo at a time that a lot of the trends are pointing to our technology we talk about some of them we talk about merger of physical and digital spaces we talk about the transformation the automobile we talk about the merge of computing and mobile the enterprise transformation of the home there are many of those trends and those trends create opportunities for qualcomm uh to be uh providing technology first and as such we're in a hurry so i'm in a little bit of a hurry because i think the opportunity is incredible for technology but uh but having fun and and enjoying the job is there a burden because of so much what you said is uh partnerships and you know almost like friendships connections with other human beings uh me as an introvert that has a lot of social anxiety that seems extremely stressful so is there that burden on your shoulders you have to wake up every day and talk to friends you've had for many years it could be you know and then convince them and make partnerships with them talk with them describe to them the future sell them an idea and then yourself grow because you don't know what the heck the future is going to be like you have to project both confidence and humility all those kinds of things is that exhausting um it is exhausting but it's something i i do like to do and it's not only with partners really it's also internally to your employees i think to get alignment on the vision and uh and faith and the vision and execute and at the end of the day we're very fortunate we have a lot of smart people so people when if they're aligned with the vision they know what to do and and then of course as ceo you have to convince your investors that's the that's the right idea as well if you can put on your wise sage hat i do you have a device for young people in high school and college you yourself started from the humble beginnings in brazil maybe a bit of a wild risky decision to go to japan and now are at the head of one of the biggest most successful most impactful companies in the world given that story can you give advice to young people today that you know how they can have a career or just the life they can be proud of i think the first thing and i'm and of course all of those answers are kind of relate to my own experience right the first thing is it always work for me to have to have a plan even if the plan is just what i'm gonna do within the next two years but what do i want to do where do i want to go and uh and i think it's important for people especially young people um is is to really you know have a dream and go pursue it i mean have dreams not go back to bed to sleep it's really what what do you want to accomplish and then what it's going to take to do that and uh and then believe in yourself um you know i like i said i joined qualcomm as an engineer and uh i didn't have any plans when i joined uh to be ceo but i do want to as an engineer what do i wanted to do what i where when what where i want to contribute what i wanted to work on and then and then keep evolving from that point in time the other thing is this is an advice it's more of like career advice that i got i got early in my career was extremely helpful for me and i will give that advice to everyone that is interesting um spend time understanding what are what are the things you're good at and what are things you're not like what is that real border between your area of competence in your area of incompetence and once you see that once you see that you know exactly what you have to work on and you can say i can if i that's where i want to go next this is the gap i need to do it and it's it's it's faster when you can identify yourself before other people can tell you then it leads to automatically the next step surround yourself the people that are very good at the things that you're not [Laughter] so you have to be radically honest about the things that you're not good at but given what you're passionate about you need to get good at or you would like to get good at and surround yourself by those people how often did the plans you make actually work out you said it's important to make plans you didn't say anything about uh it's important to execute on this more than fifty percent yeah right try to keep it above 50. uh what was the whole why did you end up in japan you know i've been uh fortunate enough to work in cellular and wireless my entire career so i i always like communications when i went to engineering school uh my dad was an electrical engineer but he worked with the utility company he wanted to me to graduate in traditional electrical engineering like hi in energy generation distribution um and but i like electronics communication so i end up doing both and and i always like communication was fascinated by wireless communication so my first job at a college i started working for a japanese company down in brazil uh was nec and within about a year in they transferred me to tokyo asked me to go to the headquarters and it was the first time i left brazil and a little bit different from brazil cultural different uh is in the other side of the planet and and that's how it started you said your father's an electrical engineer uh do you think what you're doing now makes your father proud i think he's very proud i think uh especially you know um he tells me that uh you know i'm still the same person that never changed and uh does he still does he give you advice does he criticize what you're doing no how to improve my my mom and dad still give me advice today i'm very fortunate for that but uh uh but uh uh his his proud also proud because they're very few brazilians uh uh they have you know achieve a position as ceo of uh of a company the size of qualcomm and i and i do know that that also i carry a burden i you know i especially for the latino community to be an inspiration for them and make sure i set a good example so not just your your mom and dad but um the culture the people that uh were originally your home do you uh you know life is finite do you think about your own mortality look i'm uh i'm a devout christian and uh so i'm a big believer that there's uh this is just a transition and uh but um don't spend a lot of time thinking about that i'm i am uh somebody good better and different that try as much as possible to leave the present and that's what i do and try to make the present better on this on this place here on earth absolutely and that some of these technologies some of these ideas are kind of a different kind of immortality as well because they they propagate through time and have impact on people in the best possible way so technology can be scary can technology can be destructive but it seems like in the end it can be it can do a lot of good more people there's more good than bad what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing i asked you about aliens observing us what what's the meaning of life cristiano what's the meaning of life easy questions that's not an easy question at all uh i think that's uh that's the question at least for me you have to answer individually uh but uh i do believe we're all here for purpose you know i i you know in my prayers i always ask that you know i i stay on track whatever my purpose is but i do believe we're here for purpose and we need to do the best we can during the time we have on this earth so that means create beautiful things for you as an engineer yes and create beautiful things yes what about love what's the role of love in the human condition love's very important and uh it's an essential part of being human it comes in the package and i think if you look at the situation what's happening right now i think uh look at the situation with some of the underprivileged uh communities look at the homeless situation i think we all need more love yeah and i think people that build incredible technology sometimes forget the love part like those are all it's all integrated there's no thinking about humanity is really important when you build tools that empower that humanity because there's i think i at least i personally believe we're all capable of both evil and good and we have to build technology build societies build governments build communities that um inspire us to to connect with the good part within all of us i'm a big believer that technology is at the end the force for good and if just look if you just look you know not trying to move away from a deep discussion to a more uh specific technical one but if we started a conversation talking about smartphones and uh smartphones really the first time that you could say that everybody in the world was able to connect to the internet and connect to each other and i think what uh that empowerment that that provided it's an incredible force for good well the company you lead the the technology you've created one of them that i'm especially excited about which is snapdragon the whole line of processors there currently i would say at about 10 billion transistors if you think about the human brain it's about 100 billion neurons so i think uh 11 samsung galaxy 22s s22s are already smarter than me and that's being nice to me i'm really honored that you spent your extremely valuable time with me uh even though you said pele is the favorite player um beyond all of that uh i think you're an incredible person an incredible leader and you lead an incredible engineering company so thank you for doing that oh thank you so much thanks for the kind words really a pleasure having this conversation i really had a lot of fun doing it and uh thank you for having me in the podcast thanks for listening to this conversation with cristiano ahman to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from stephen hawking for millions of years mankind lived just like the animals then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination we learn to talk and learn to listen speech has allowed the communication of ideas enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking it doesn't have to be like this our greatest hopes could become reality in the future with the technology at our disposal the possibilities are unbounded all we need to do is make sure we keep talking thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you