Stuff Meets Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies

On gaming, offline presences and more…

We sat down with Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, to talk about the company's plans for the Indian market. Kondap oversees the expansion of the company's Snapdragon compute PC and Chromebook ecosystems, as well as the dedicated handheld gaming category.

In this exclusive interview, Kondap discusses Qualcomm's plans to assure customers that their chips are here for the long run, the future of gaming on Snapdragon, and the company's partnerships with game developers

Both Intel and AMD are pretty much household names at this point, what steps is Qualcomm Snapdragon going to take in India to assure customers that their chips are here for the long run?

So I think, when it comes to phone space, consumers think of Snapdragon as a premium phone brand. And over the years we’ve established ourselves in driving awareness that when consumers buy a Snapdragon phone, they are buying premium experiences, premium performance, and the best battery life. And now in the case of PCs we’re trying to do the same thing and whether it's the X Elite, X Plus or the X platform, we’re making sure that they are able to take the same premium experiences and bring them to PCs.

The first three necessary things that a consumer should relate with are the best-performing device, the second is best battery life and the third is AI across the board. So as consumers in India are very aware of Snapdragon in their phones, part of why we’re are here, for example, with the Croma launch, is to make sure they’re able to drive correlation between the Snapdragon that they know in their phones which has the same Snapdragon now that they know in PCs and other devices.

Gaming is one of the categories that you handle and currently, ARM chips are still not 100% compatible with games, what is the future like for Qualcomm and gaming two or three years from now?

So Elite Gaming is a very well-known brand within the Snapdragon category of products. Consumers understand that when you look at Elite Gaming features they’re getting the best of game experiences on a phone. We are doing something very similar on PCs. We’ve optimised more than 1200 games today, on the PC. Many of them are triple-A titles and we continue to optimise that. What we don't want to do yet, is the hardcore gaming community is looking for something very different. And that's not the focus for us right now. The focus for us is we want to make sure that most casual games run really well. Many of the triple-A titles work well. Given our partnerships with all the game providers, the game engine and everybody. We have the partnerships and we continue to work with them to provide the games on Snapdragon.

And the only thing I’ll tease out for you is that keep an eye out for later this year. We will have some pretty exciting announcements on gaming.

Speaking of partnerships, is Snapdragon increasing more partnerships with game developers in the PC space to bring the latest titles to the platform?

The short answer is yes! You will hear more announcements from us in a few weeks. Again, a few months from now you’ll hear, even bigger partnerships. Obviously, Tim Sweeney talked about it at Snapdragon Summit. He talks about our partnership there and the kind of things we’re doing so overall I think you should expect it. The games are largely different, but the engine guys and stuff are pretty much the same. So we already have all the partnerships in place and it's moving pretty rapidly. We've shown like Control and multiple triple-A games that are already running on Snapdragon so continue and lead the way with that.

The true value of X Elite chips is their phenomenal battery life which is because it's an ARM-based architecture, so why not market the products based on battery life instead of showcasing AI through Microsoft Co-Pilot?

There are three areas where we focus, one is the best performance, the second is battery life and the third is AI. We did focus probably, and a little bit too much initially on AI, but I think, in the holiday season we anchored a lot more battery life and now I say we’re more balanced in terms of how we’re positioning stuff.

We don't want consumers to lose focus cause there are still AI experiences for which all the app developers are porting stuff on the NPU. They are also moving fast and all these model developers are moving fast so while we don't want to focus, but your point is very valid, you do get the best battery life on Snapdragon, especially if you’ve used it.

Part of the reason why you see this partnership with Croma is we want to be able to create experience zones so consumers walk into the stores they’re able to relate and feel the devices and see what devices we have.

The new price category Qualcomm is entering next week is extremely important for the Indian audience, is Qualcomm expecting higher demand in this category or are you going to play it by ear?

We were very confident and I think all the OEMs are confident. I think you’ll hear from all the partners today as well as on Monday. We deliberately picked the timing for the launch in India to be now, exactly to the reason what you said, we launched X Elite in June in devices at $1000 and above price points. Then we launched the X Elite Plus say, in $800 and above, and then the X we just launched at CES. And so we know the sweet spot for India is right around there.

Everybody is very committed, you’ll see devices on shelves from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus and you’ll see all the leading brands that you are familiar with. So we’re committed!

Rumours are that Nvidia and MediaTek teaming up to make a new ARM-based SoC, what do you have to say about that?

I don't know much about it, but at the same time, it just endorses the fact that there is a large non-x86 processor that is leading the way. And so we’ve established the market and we establish ourselves with that.

And we’re are doing a lot of stuff when you think about where X Elite has established itself. Right from simple things like Microsoft’s partnership with us, the deep collaboration that they've done in partnering and driving all of the (AI) model work that they’re doing at run on Snapdragon, all the way to even the number of ISVs (Independent Software Vendor) that are porting their applications to Snapdragon and all of the AI hub work we have done to make a ubiquitous platform for all the developers to able to write applications. So it's exciting. It's exciting that we’re able to lead in that category.