Qualcomm showed off two new computing platforms this week at its annual Snapdragon Summit that promise to put generative AI into laptops, phones, and more.
The Snapdragon X Elite for PCs and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for phones include powerful new neural processing units (NPUs) that will do things like power Stable Diffusion on next year's premium smartphones.
"Generative AI is the new way to interface with devices," claims Qualcomm. The company says its new platforms bring "a wave of generative AI" to devices and apps with an "enhanced focus on immediacy, reliability, personalization, and privacy."
Laptop buyers will realize these experiences via the Snapdragon X Elite, the rebranded version of Qualcomm's PC computing platform. Qualcomm says the X Elite was built with AI in mind from the start. It packs a powerful NPU and top CPU together in an efficient package for Windows 11 PCs. Smartphone buyers will similarly get to interact with AI thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform. Android flagships next year will have access to a much more capable NPU which can use AI to create content, improve camera results, extend mobile music range, and even manage connections.
"We are entering the era of AI, and on-device generative AI will play a critical role in delivering powerful, fast, personal, efficient, secure and highly optimized experiences," says Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon. "Snapdragon is uniquely positioned to help shape and capitalize on the on-device AI opportunity and you will see generative AI going virtually everywhere that Snapdragon goes."
Stable Diffusion on a phone (Credit: Qualcomm)What are those experiences? They will be simple to start. On Windows PCs, Qualcomm demonstrated generative AI tasks including on-device chat assistants at 30 tokens per second. On smartphones, Qualcomm is offering a Stable Diffusion-driven image generator that can create pictures on-device in about one second. The company demonstrated the tech earlier this year on prototype hardware.
Why run these on-device? Qualcomm touts benefits such as personalization, privacy and security, energy savings, immediacy, and cost. For example, rather than run Stable Diffusion on cloud-based computers, having the chipset on a phone to run the image generator allows the person requesting the image to maintain privacy (the prompt isn't sent to the cloud) while receiving the image faster (one second compared to one minute) at a lower energy rate than what would be required by a cloud-based server.
(Credit: Qualcomm)"Our years of AI development, including the most powerful combination of CPU, NPU, and GPU available in devices, and our support of all leading models running natively, means we can bring the benefits of generative AI to users worldwide and across multiple device categories," Amon says. "The partner support we have at Snapdragon Summit is a testament to our standing in the industry as an on-device AI leader."
The company has lined up a number of hardware partners that plan to support the AI features of Qualcomm's latest chips, including Baidu, Bloom, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, RWKV, and Youdao.
Devices with the Snapdragon X Elite for PCs and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for phones aren't expected to appear until early next year.
(Note: PCMag is attending Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit by invitation, but in keeping with our ethics policy, we have assumed all costs for travel and lodging for the conference.)
