Whatever AI might be, it’s the future for smartphones
Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset at its Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Maui. The company paid for my trip to the island to check out the next platform that will power phones that could include the Galaxy S24, the OnePlus 12, and many more of the best phones we expect to see in 2024. The fulcrum of the next gen platform will be AI features, though it remains unclear exactly what those will be, and that’s precisely the point.
Today’s processing platforms, on most mobile devices and laptops, are made up of the CPU for application processing and the GPU for graphics and specialized applications. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, like the Google Tensor chipsets, has its own Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, that is designed to run machine learning (ML) applications and functions. Unlike Google’s Tensor chipset, however, Qualcomm is not locking its NPU to one company’s ML features.
Machine learning is big for Qualcomm this year. Meta’s Ray Ban Smart Glasses work with a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset running similar ML concepts. Microsoft has tested its Copilot AI software with Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon X Elite laptop chipset. Now, phone makers will be able to bundle AI features into the device using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platform
Qualcomm demonstrated the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset using the Stable Diffusion generative AI image engine to create a new image from a prompt request, on a mobile device and not in the cloud, in less than one second. The Gen 3 chipset can use large language models (LLM) like Meta’s Llama model to create generative text responses on-device using billions of possible instruction parameters.
Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be used in devices from manufacturers including ASUS, Honor, iQOO, MEIZU, NIO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, realme, Redmi, RedMagic, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
