live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron inside 2018 brought to you by micron welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Valentin I'm here with my co-host David Floria we're covering micron insight 2018 really bring it together memory storage and artificial intelligence talking about AI for good talking about changing the way in which we work new workloads Raj to Lori is here he's the senior vice president and general manager of microns a booming mobile business unit rise I think it's the fastest growing business unit at micron at least of XY's and Keith crescent is here is the senior vice a senior vice president at Qualcomm Keith welcome thank gentlemen thanks for coming on the cube okay thank you so right let's let's start with you what are the big trends that you see that are driving that at 60% growth rate in your business yeah I mean we are finding now that you know mobile phones and use of memory in mobile phones and this is DRAM and also use of storage in mobile phones this is where we actually you know like flash both are growing inside a mobile phone you know we've seen people launch you know four and six gigabyte phones and now we have our customers talking about 8 and 10 and 12 gigabyte phones in the future and one of the big reasons is the applications you know a lot of machine learning and AI applications from the phones and those are driving the need for a lot of increased both storage and memory so we talked about what's changing in your business over the last several years I mean mobile obviously exploded onto the scene but now people are talking about AI and mobile and and and just increase use cases and applications so what's going on from your perspective yeah I think my handset perspective there's been some visual changes right the screens got a little bigger the bezels get smaller phones get a little thinner and so you see some of the visual cues but really the excitement of what's going on underneath the visual cues so the amount of AI processing is accelerating at a rapid pace a lot of advanced cameras you know moving from two three four and now their phones with five cameras cameras to recognize depth perception there's a voice recognition so there's a lot of AI processing and a lot of capability getting into the phone for a variety of applications okay so voice recognition that makes sense you'd use AI for that but you're talking about AI in in visual and in in the handset talk more about that explain how that all works yeah so so actually I would argue that today imaging is probably the primary application of AI so cameras used to be just capturing pixels but now it's about much more than capturing pixels it's about understanding what those pixels are so are they recognizing objects or food or something else or is it facial recognition for things like payments and biometrics and so the cameras now are much more intelligent and with multiple cameras you're adding depth information so then you start to get to much higher levels of realism for things like avatar and gaming and other areas where the camera is capturing and also perceiving so not a hot dog for you fans of the show Silicon Valley so but Raj what does this all mean for the the memory and storage requirements yeah I mean eyes keep mentioned I think you know the mobile phone you know with the process from Qualcomm and and other processor vendors has really gotten to have a lot more camera applications and a lot more AI applications now there's a there's a difference when you actually drive applications that need AI and machine learning versus other applications and the difference is that the compute paradigm in AI and ml is different in the sense that these are like complex neural networks that need a load of lot of data very close to the processor to achieve the result so as more AI applications come in we are actually finding that the customers which are Qualcomm customers and our customers are asking for more processing from the airside but they're also asking for more higher speeds higher density memory to kite to couple tightly with the process so they can realize these AI applications for the consumers and also storage because sometimes you want to store a lot of the images and videos on the card so both storage and memory are increasing as applications come in but I'd like to ask about the gaming side of things and the ante AR that seems to me that is is starting to improve to a level which is frightening linear reality what do you have to do to get it to that stage where you can have true VR and have games for example which exploit that sure so maybe first I'll talk about gaming specifically gaming obviously continues to grow a lot of money in gaming gaming tournaments and so forth the gaming certainly is getting more realistic with better graphics and so forth better displays multiplayer gaming very hot right multiplayer gaming requires you know very fast connections very low latency connections to another source so play multiple players can play at the same time also many times for games you'll have a play with partners maybe you're on a team of five but now in coming soon maybe that team of five you don't need to find that fifth person or that fourth person maybe there's an AI engine that's running similar to the human capability and you're actually playing with a simulated player right from teams so there's in that require opens up a whole new area of processing for the games and then I think for AR and BR AR is a little further out than VR err requires some more advancements with respect to optics and so forth VR is taking you know high-end displays and AI and graphics kind of packaging it all into one to really change the paradigm of how you interact with the computer how does 5g change things is it is it as much of a game changer as people think or is there just so much data that it sort of allows us to keep pace I wonder if you can talk about 5g yeah so so you know every ten years or so there's a G transition 3G and 99 4G in 2009 now 5g in 2019 so it's not a ten-year cadence and every time when you have a G transition you couple that with a transition in computing and it changes the paradigm so what's gonna happen is 5g is gonna bring a lot more capacity a lot lower latency at the same time AI is coming in and that together is going to create a pretty powerful platform for applications for the future and then of course there's just so much more data now how do you guys keep because the you mentioned you know you've been talking to the to the street and you mentioned this morning that the the rate of bit density that is is moderating so how do you guys keep up where are your investments that allow you to keep pace yeah I mean we have a so just maybe a little bit of comment on 5g I think as the bandwidth to the device gets faster and faster there's more and more data that comes in that you can imagine for example one of the things people out of people like to do you know is to you know download content if you look at Netflix if you look at Amazon Prime if you look at even DirecTV and I have all of those you can actually download the content now and watch them offline so as it happens and that content gets to be 4k and an even higher frame rates the amount of storage that's needed to download that is getting more and more like you know you know my wife upgraded her phone the other day and the first thing she said is I want an entire Netflix season on my phone when I'm in the gym so so you know there's simple things like that I've changed a lot you know that's one of the reasons why the storage is getting so much now when you go to 5g and the download speed gets higher you can download like a 4k video really quickly now you got to put it somewhere after you downloaded so that's actually driving the need for this so before people wouldn't like download a 4k video because where would you put it so as we increase storage that kind of stuff comes really fast because you couldn't you know take a long time to download before so as the bandwidth gets higher the storage requirements the memory requirements are getting higher now what we are doing on that front is we're investing a lot you know as Sanjay and Scott talked earlier both in our fab capacity is both in our technology transitions we have a lot of new interesting technologies like new emerging memories they're actually like 3d crosspoint we talked about that kind of blur the line between storage and memory so there's a lot of new interesting technologies that will actually take advantage of that super exciting time so going back to the image processing side of that one of the trends it seems to me is that the processing is going further and further to the edge itself and going inside the camera itself do you talk a little bit about that and what it's going to take to to put that that your memory technology or bandwidth right inside the camera itself sure so so there's no doubt that you want to maximize the capability on the edge as a first step and then you want to reduce the late as much as possible to the cloud as a second step so on the edge you know if you had something for example if I'm taking a picture of you and I want face recognition I don't want to take every frame and send it up to the clouds I'm gonna waste bandwidth so on I want that capability on device and that's true for a variety of different applications you want to maximize the capability on device and then focus on the fast connection so the cloud and the device from a latency and bandwidth perspective are much tightly more tightly coupled you know you think about the evolution of computing you know obviously everything was centralized and then you know pcs the world was about pcs back then it was kind of the the centralization with it was a bit blip on the screen compared to the pcs was everything remember that and then of course mobile drove cloud through the roof and now with the edge and cloud and and mobile you're seeing just this ubiquitous capability that senses now you bring in AI you bring in machine intelligence it what do you guys envision for the for the next 10 years in terms of what the world looks like centralized decentralized distributed intelligent I mean it's just mind-boggling what's your vision well I think if you look at client devices client devices certainly generate a lot of data maybe we get a little bit of data from a sensor and a bridge but maybe we'll get a lot of data from the car traveling across that bridge and what you need to do is you need to make sense of that data locally and then transmit it back to the cloud so you want the cloud to have the most useful data or sorted data right data that can then improve you know automated driving or reduce traffic accidents and so forth but you don't want all the data sent there so what's gonna happen is on the edge there's literally you know a device is going from smartphones where there's about one and a half billion a year to billions even trillions of IOT connected devices any device that has a computing element also is can have a connectivity element also is going to have an AI element so it's gonna be a much more connected world as opposed to just connected people yeah I mean I think kids keep explained it very well you know you know if you step back a little bit I think that the history of technology and evolution has been very similar right in industry for a while but we all remember the times when we said we just did month one mainframe and everyone needs dumb terminals right then we went on to say hey you know what I think distributed computing with everyone having a pcs that I think you do now we are back to maybe we should have everything in the cloud and the edge devices so I actually think in a world goes cyclical and the more you do at the edge the more it drives the need for the cloud and we call it the virtuous cycle and I think the best way to think about it is you want the HD devices to send information not data which means they need to be for data needs to be processed with memory and compute to become information and then you send the information to the edge yeah I guess my point was that you know I've been around a while too and you're going to see the pendulum swing I feel like the pendulum is not swinging anymore it's just exploded inside it's really an exciting time in our industry guys thanks very much for coming thank you appreciate thank you all right keep right there everybody we'll be back at micron insight from the Embarcadero you're watching the cube right back [Music]