Strong demand for on-chip artificial intelligence (AI) in PCs, game consoles, smartphones, tablets and more will accelerate the growth for AI chipset shipments, reaching 1.3 billion by 2030, according to new data from ABI Research.
The focus has shifted to on-device generative AI and chipsets that can handle inference workloads that were previously limited to cloud computing.
“In the smartphone market, OEMs like Vivo and Samsung have started implementing heterogenous AI chipsets and investing in generative AI applications to deploy on their devices,” said Paul Schell, analyst for ABI Research. “While chip vendors Qualcomm and MediaTek have promoted their developer and optimization tools to kickstart application development.”
Simultaneously, the PC market is having a similar path as AMD and Intel have started shipping heterogenous AI chipsets for PCs while AI software is being developed by Microsoft. What are AI PCs being used for? These computers are being positioned to move access to data from a cloud-dependent paradigm to locally accessible integrated AI capabilities.
This allows users to use AI functions immediately on their device rather than using a search engine or other device.
“We can observe all corners of the ecosystem rallying behind the potential of low-latency, data-private AI applications that can scale beyond cloud environments, although we are still at a very early stage,” Schell said.
Distributing workloads
According to ABI Research, heterogeneous AI chipsets are being used to distribute workloads between CPU, GPU and NPU for both generative and multimodal AI.
While more demanding on-device AI capabilities in PCs will be addressed by GPU cards, the chipsets should remain in demand moving forward as these capabilities become more in demand.
“ABI Research believes productivity AI applications can reduce refresh cycles of smartphones, notebooks, and desktops – as well as other AI applications in tablets and gaming consoles — and provide the incentive to bring about this uptick in demand,” Schell said.
