Behind every new feature in a smartphone is a powerful chipset that brings it to life. The industry’s shift to on-device AI has created a need for more advanced and capable systems-on-chips (SoCs), and Qualcomm’s latest iteration aims to address this.
On Monday, at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, the company unveiled its latest mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which it claims is the world’s most powerful and fastest processor. The chip is the first flagship mobile platform under the new “Elite” branding, highlighting improved graphics performance.
I also tested Meta’s limited edition Ray-Ban smart glasses, and they were pretty much the perfect wearable for me.
The new mobile platform is powered by a combination of 2nd generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU, and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. The latter is essential for optimizing on-device AI tasks such as image generation and text translation.
Other key highlights of the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip include 24 MB total cache, 4.32 GHz maximum CPU frequency, 45% single-core improvement, and 62% faster web browsing for superior processing. The ability promises to improve the user experience. All of this is fancy jargon that suggests that the next wave of flagship Android smartphones, arriving as early as late 2024, will be well-equipped to handle subsequent advances in AI capabilities.
“Today, we are debuting our second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPUs in our flagship mobile platform. This is a major advancement and we expect consumers to be excited about the new experiences enabled by our CPU technology. ,” said Chris Patrick, SVP and GM. Qualcomm Technologies said in a press release about the number of mobile phones.
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In particular, Snapdragon 8 Elite makes multimodal generative AI applications more possible on Snapdragon-powered devices. As generative AI applications become more sophisticated, they are evolving beyond text input and output. Many companies can now accept multimodal data such as photos, videos, and audio for more context-aware assistance.
“It (Snapdragon 8 Elite) revolutionizes the mobile experience by delivering personalized, multimodal generative AI directly on the device, enabling the understanding of voice, context, and images, and prioritizing user privacy. while enhancing everything from productivity to creativity tasks,” added Patrick. .
Google’s Gemini Live will eventually support multimodal features that answer questions about your surroundings.
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Benefits of on-device processing include faster processing speeds because users experience less latency by eliminating sending data to the cloud, and increased security because data never leaves the device. There are several things that can be mentioned. Other benefits include minimizing the energy used in data centers, making data centers a more sustainable business choice.
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This flagship chipset also powers other mobile features such as the photography and photo editing experience with features such as AI Relighting, Video Magic Eraser, and “AI Pet Suite.” It also powers CPU-intensive games. Multiplayer gameplay and overall great visuals.
Qualcomm has not revealed which flagship phones will be equipped with the new chipset. However, it did share that the Snapdragon 8 Elite will be adopted by major manufacturers such as Samsung, Asus, OnePlus, Oppo, Honor, iQOO, RealMe, Redmi, and Xiaomi, with the first devices expected to be launched in the coming weeks.
disclosure: Sabrina Ortiz’s trip to Maui, Hawaii for the Qualcomm Summit was paid for by Qualcomm, a common industry practice for long-distance travel. The judgments and opinions of ZDNET’s writers and editors are always independent of the companies covered.
