Qualcomm, Nvidia spar for top spot in AI chip efficiency tests

Artificial intelligence chips from Qualcomm Inc beat Nvidia Corp in two out of three measures of power efficiency in a new set of test data published on Wednesday.

Nvidia dominates the market for training AI models with huge amounts of data. But after those AI models are trained, they are put to wider use in what is called “inference” by doing tasks like generating text responses to prompts and deciding whether an image contains a cat.

Analysts believe that the market for data center inference chips will grow quickly as businesses put AI technologies into their products, but companies such as Alphabet Inc’s Google are already exploring how to keep the lid on the extra costs that doing so will add.

One of those major costs is electricity, and Qualcomm has used its history designing chips for battery-powered devices such as smartphones to create a chip called the Cloud AI 100 that aims for parsimonious power consumption.

In testing data published on Wednesday by MLCommons, an engineering consortium that maintains testing benchmarks widely used in the AI chip industry, Qualcomm’s AI 100 beat Nvidia’s flagship H100 chip at classifying images, based on how many data center server queries each chip can carry out per watt.

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