The 65 is on the road here at Snapdragon Summit 2024 in beautiful Maui. Daniel, it's great to be back. I mean, we've seen innovation in mobility, we've seen innovation in automotive, we got a little bit more information about the PC market. It's been pretty exciting and you know, a big AI wrapper across all of them.
Yeah, this event has evolved so much while the location has stayed the same. A destination I think anybody would be happy to come to. It's been really great to watch the company evolve. You and I have talked over the last several years about the company's diversification strategy, how it used to report and how it is reporting now. It's entering new markets, but more importantly, it's not just entering markets for sort of the PR value, it's entering markets and winning. And I think that's been a big theme here. It's not just what are we doing, it's what is Qualcomm doing, how is it being successful, how is it being measured. And the thing is, Pat, it's executing on that diversification strategy.
It is, and particularly with automotive, that wasn't even discussed five years ago. And I remember being at CES and they said, 'Hey, we're going to take a ride, we have ADAS.' And I said, 'Wait, you guys are doing ADAS? Really?' I had no idea. And now from a backlog perspective, it's a juggernaut. The last three or four quarters that's come up as earnings is the biggest growth segment out there. So with that said, let's bring the star of the show here, the leader of automotive and more. Nakul, welcome back at the 65.
Good afternoon. Yeah, a regular here on the show. It's been great to watch the evolution. I think you kind of heard Pat and I talking about that in the buildup. I mean, just a couple years ago, it was very handset, handset, handset, maybe some IP and licensing. And you know, there was a promise made really when Cristiano took the helm that the company was going to diversify. It's gotten into IoT, it's gotten into PCs, it's been able to dominate that RF part of the business, and then of course automotive. It's been an incredible run. But talk a little bit about that every year when we catch up, kind of how's that going, how's it evolving, how are your customers feeling, and how are you feeling about the business.
You know, I feel like we are the adult in the room in the automotive business because we've been doing this for a long time now. I mean, I know everybody in the industry, we are all living through the same complexity, the same challenges, the same competition. And you know, it feels good because technology complexity in automotive is quite a difficult thing. Automakers traditionally have been optimized for many different things: manufacturing, scale, global footprint. But as you start to bring electrification, as you start to bring software, as you start to bring driver assistance, the skill set development that is needed is a pretty complicated thing. And what we've been able to do over the last five years or so is actually think about how do we become more relevant to our customers beyond the things that they expect of us anyway. That's the journey that we've been on. And you know, I think we just basically do what we say we would. And I think customers have shown that they trust us, and I think the results speak for themselves.
Yeah, it's not only do I remember that first CES ADAS ride with the compute in the trunk, but also a conversation we had when you had first started the business. Now you were operating in stealth for a while, but this is the first time you had come out. And I remember you talking to me about the strategy of really meeting customers where they are. Some want an integrated package, some want piece parts and put them together themselves, others want parts of the solution which is a combination of the software and the hardware and even the services that come together. But you know, it's really cool to have you at the event. I was always asking, 'Why isn't there automotive at Snapdragon Summit?' And this year was the first time that you came there. I think that's a really good move for the company to do that. You made some major announcements today, two major product announcements. You had a customer design win on stage, a lot of stuff going on. Tell us about the announcements.
So we announced the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and the Ride Elite. This is our fifth generation SoC in eight and a half years. So you can imagine from the time that we started to get into the compute business to where we are at, this is a juggernaut. This is a beast in terms of, you know, so when we talk about central compute, this defines what central compute is going to mean for the car. Now think about where we are coming from. We are deployed across every automaker in terms of driving some form of ADAS, a lot of cockpit for pretty much every automaker. We are in the second generation, maybe the third generation design cycle with most of these automakers. So we have a pretty good idea as to what it is that we're going to have to incrementally change and what's going to have to change that's going to be far in excess of what anybody had imagined. Those were the inputs that we took. We've had a lot of customers provide us input into what they want to see designed. And I'm super excited about what we can do with this product because already I can tell you from the time that we lock specs down to the types of questions that people are asking, I know that we're going to have to start to think about architectures, how can you double this up, where is AI headed. One principle that we adopted a few years ago which was a very important decision that we made was we will only design chips with full safety. We are not going to design anything that appears like, 'Oh, this is a smartphone,' that means like a sold IP block level. So there are various types of ways that you can do safety. We design every single, so if you take our NPU, it's designed to be safe. So if you have to certify the software that's running on the NPU for ADAS, it has to go through safety certification. And that level of rigor is going to be needed if you have to do these things at scale. You can't, there are no shortcuts really. So operating at that scale, I mean, there are many different ways to enter into these markets, but we've taken an approach, we are sticking with it. Customers appreciate the directness and the strategy, and I think you heard from some of them today.
