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URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-QAIC-100-Firmware-Perf

⇱ Qualcomm Updates AI Accelerator Firmware To Fix Power / Performance Issue - Phoronix

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Qualcomm Updates AI Accelerator Firmware To Fix Power / Performance Issue

Written by Michael Larabel in AI on 18 November 2025 at 09:50 AM EST. 4 Comments
Qualcomm upstreamed new Cloud AI 100 "AIC100" firmware today to linux-firmware.git to fix a rather significant power/performance issue for these AI accelerators.

It turns out that the Qualcomm Cloud AI accelerators had a rather egreious firmware issue causing excessive power use for some workloads that in turn led to thermal throttling and lower performance.

👁 Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 slide


This commit today to linux-firmware.git for updating the Qualcomm AIC100 firmware notes:
"Update the firmware files for the Qualcomm aic100 product to that of the 1.20.2.6 release. This release contains a bug fix that addresses an issue with the device consuming excessive power under some workloads which then causes the device to [excessively] throttle and reduce overall performance."

No further details were publicly shared, but if you are using any Qualcomm Cloud AI hardware, you may want to ensure that your firmware is updated.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.