Qualcomm’s lackluster Q2 2023 results, blamed on the sustained slowdown in smartphone sales, is just a little local difficulty – compared with its ongoing existential battle with Arm over the architectural guts of its chipsets. There is also the side plot of Qualcomm’s efforts to diversify and reduce dependence on smartphone chips, or for that matter public 5G networks, by targeting automotive and other IoT sectors, as well as jumping on the AI mobile edge bandwagon. Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon cited its newly launched Snapdragon X75 5G modem chipset for 5G Advanced as a source of hope for 2024 when that starts to be deployed with 3GPP Release 18. None of those hopes are convincing for various reasons.…