Ampere Computing on Thursday said it was pairing its chips with those from Qualcomm in a new offering aimed at lowering the power bills from operating artificial intelligence chips. Founded by Renee James, a former president of Intel, Ampere uses technology from Arm Holdings to make central processing chips that are used by Oracle, Alphabet's Google and others. The startup has focused on making chips that are more energy efficient than industry leaders Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
“You could almost argue that the smartphone is becoming a little bit closer to a washing machine than the cutting-edge, rapidly changing device category that it used to be,” says Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, a technology research firm. Samsung Electronics and Alphabet Google, which have spent years partnering on mobile phones—and the Android software that powers them—see a silver bullet in the form of artificial intelligence. “This new era of AI is a profound opportunity to make smartphones truly smart,” Sameer Samat, Google’s vice president of product management for Android, said during the Google I/O developers conference on Tuesday.