Qualcomm Bets on Near-Memory Computing
ryanshrout · x · 2026-07-14
This post highlights a key takeaway from Qualcomm Investor Day: in the AI era, the underlying memory architecture matters more than just individual accelerators or processors.
Citing Qualcomm, the author notes that over the past decade, transformer model sizes have grown roughly 240x every two years, while AI hardware memory has only increased 2x. High Bandwidth Compute (HBC) integrates compute directly into the memory package, bringing the internal bandwidth of DRAM stacks closer to the actual usable bandwidth for workloads, rather than being primarily bottlenecked by external interfaces.
The post also mentions aggressive roadmap targets:
- HBC Gen 1 on Dragonfly AI250 is expected to deliver an 18x boost in effective memory bandwidth
- Gen 2 on AI300 targets a 54x improvement
However, the author cautions that these are roadmap projections, not benchmarked results, and the real challenge lies in delivering these gains under actual inference workloads.
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