Massimiliano Rossi, Acer EMEA Vice President: Qualcomm will gain equal share with AMD and Intel for business laptops in the long run

Whilst at IFA 2024, I interviewed Massimiliano Rossi, Acer’s EMEA Vice President. He had many interesting things to say, but perhaps the most provocative was his prediction that Intel, AMD and Qualcomm would have the same market share “in the long run”. Although he was specifically referring to business laptops, not consumer laptops.

Thankfully, he isn’t like so many VPs I speak to; they tend to be guarded, worried about saying something that might come back to haunt them. Massimiliano is far happier to cover ground and share his personal views, rather than sticking to the corporate line.

I’ve split the interview into three sections and edited Massimiliano’s answers for clarity and brevity.

• How Acer is using AI itself
• Changing face of processors in laptops
• Copilot+ PCs and Acer

How Acer is using AI itself

When it comes to AI, how are you using it in your job?

Massimiliano Rossi: “A lot of us [at Acer] have the full Office with Copilot, so we can really enhance our meetings. We can have the summary after the meeting, and the transcript. These elements are really, really useful, and we’ve started to use these tools more and more.

“I really appreciate the capability to summarise, because I frequently receive a lot of documents, a lot of presentations, but I struggle to find the time to go through all of them.

“When I think something is interesting, I drop everything into Copilot and ask it to summarise, and then I start to interact with it – like someone gave me the brief of the meeting. And then ask him questions and he replies to me, and this is super powerful because it can really save me time or let me learn something I would never do otherwise.”

So are you changing the way you work?

MR: “As a company, we say that AI is changing the behaviour of users from search to ask. That is true. You interact with your computer to tailor what it needs to come back to you.

“We are also introducing a preliminary AI assistant to access information. We have a very comprehensive reporting system based on [Microsoft] Power BI where you can find everything from customer information to orders to intake stock. And we are now using local information because security from a corporate perspective is a key element.

“So you can ask this system, that we call Sophia – we gave it a female name – how many TravelMate orders have been entered today? Can you tell me which is the problem delivery? And actually this is not really smart. It’s going and fetching the information, and then it comes to you and you can ask for more details.”

Changing face of processors in laptops

Have you been impressed by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips for laptops, which have finally made Windows on Arm a reality through Copilot+ PCs?

Massimiliano Rossi: “The CPU landscape is changing and that, by the way, is good. if you follow the latest announcement from Intel on Lunar Lake [Intel’s Core Ultra 200V series], they were pushed by the Arm architecture. They achieved unbelievable results in terms of performance per watt and this will bring a big benefit for the end user – because one of the pain points for mobile users all the time was battery life. I mean, everybody was saying it lasts a lot of hours, but in real life, you need to really take the power brick with you.

“So I think Arm and Qualcomm were the ones to crack it, providing unbelievable performance per watt, and now Intel is following, and I think it’s a very good competition to deliver better and better designs that Acer can translate into nice products. So I think Qualcomm is doing a great job, but Intel and AMD also are, so it will be a nice competition. The best is yet to come because they will push each other. This is very good for the industry.”

So do you want to make any predictions for, say, three years down the line?

MR: “It’s difficult to make a prediction, but compared to the past I feel the ecosystem is working on the weaknesses. They will be more and more fine-tuned to provide a smooth user experience.

“For example, it’s true that Arm may be a little bit [weak in terms of] compatibility, but they are making massive improvements. As soon as we see a problem, they fix, they fix, they fix – and they have unbelievable performance per watt. Intel, on the contrary, is super rock solid on compatibility, but they are catching up on power consumption. So I think everybody is acknowledging where they need to improve. And this will bring all of them to the next level.

“[But] a CPU alone cannot succeed if it doesn’t have the right ecosystem. Microsoft is a very important actor, and Microsoft has invested a massive amount of resources to make Windows on Arm. So if this commitment is still there – and my point is on this specific sector because, of course, Arm doesn’t cover gaming – but in this specific segment, I believe all these three will get closer and closer to taking a, let’s say, one-third, one-third, one-third share maybe in the long run.”

Copilot+ PCs and Acer

At IFA, Acer announced five Copilot+ PCs. So will you be upgrading to it yourself, perhaps to the Acer TravelMate P6 14 AI?

Massimiliano Rossi: “I think I will try the TravelMate P6, but [to use today’s AI services] it is not necessary to have a Copilot+ PC device, because everything is in the cloud. A Copilot+ PC gives you all the hardware you need to run AI, let’s say applications and features, at the edge, it doesn’t need cloud. Of course, cloud is still there.

“So I believe AI is evolving, and today we are bringing more and more platforms suitable to run AI applications. But what we see today, I believe, is different than what we will see in one year and more and more. This will evolve in both consumer and commercial spheres, probably mainly through ISV vendors [such as Adobe] that will implement AI features in your software to be more and more efficient.

“In commercial, it’s a matter of efficiency. I can do more at the same time, or I can automate everything. For consumers, it’s more about how can I enjoy my my time?”

Related reading: Acer announces five Copilot+ PC laptops at IFA 2024: here’s what you need to know

It feels like Acer has been cautious about Copilot+ PCs…

MR: “I think it’s not a matter of being cautious, for the major push for Copilot+ PCs [based on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips] came from Microsoft itself through the Surface portfolio. I think at Acer we have a little bit of a step-by-step approach. We try to be there to understand the market, and we saw this massive opportunity, and we are following with more and more designs.

“But it’s also true that we are extremely strong on Intel and AMD, and those designs [compatible with Copilot+ PCs] actually came a bit later. So the first wave, our first share was maybe a bit less than others, but we are absolutely committed to move on and to get this segment – but the Copilot+ segment, being still a premium segment, is not as big a volume as other segments.

“So we are leading in gaming with a leading market share in Europe. We are doing extremely well in the mainstream segment with Aspire, but those are the very big volume. The Copilot+ segment is not so big but we want to take our share for sure.”

But Acer doesn’t have a Qualcomm-based business laptop yet. Can we expect that soon?

MR: “I think we gave priority to consumer [laptops], because even in consumer the acceptance of Qualcomm is much, much better, and we don’t want to be the forerunner in the B2B sector. Our commercial revenue is specifically from SMBs, government and education, and in this segment specifically, we don’t see a quick adoption [of Qualcomm]. So for now we try to go step by step.

“I believe it will be more difficult [for Qualcomm] in the commercial sector, because here the Intel legacy of applications, of internal infrastructure, is stronger than the consumer sector.”

And what about AMD-powered laptops in the commercial space?

MR: “It is the same problem. Because if you look at AMD’s market share in the commercial space, and you look at its share with consumers, in the consumer space, AMD has cracked it. They are absolutely strong. And in some secondary sectors, they are even leading.

“In the commercial sphere Intel is dominating, because again, there’s a lot of behind the products – manageability, the history of infrastructure – and it takes time to change it.”