Qualcomm released a new snapdragon processor called the X Elite that the company claims will be better than products from major rivals, including Apple, Intel, and AMD.
The Tuesday announcement included two new chips, the X Elite for PC and one for high-end Android phones known as Snapdragon Series 8 Gen 3. These are designed to run artificial intelligence software, including the large language models (LLM) that have skyrocketed in popularity in the technology industry.
Qualcomm's New Snapdragon Processor
Qualcomm announced two new chips, the Snapdragon Series 8 Gen 3 for high-end Android devices and the Snapdragon X Elite for PC that is marketed as being more powerful than competitors' products.
Interest in artificial intelligence applications has boomed since the Stable Diffusion image generator and OpenAI's ChatGPT were released in late 2022. These two so-called "generative AI" applications require a lot of processing power and they have so far run primarily in the cloud on powerful and power-hungry NVIDIA graphics processors.
The speed at which a smartphone's chip processes AI models could represent a new feature battleground between high-end Android mobile devices from various companies. These include Asus, Sony, and OnePlus versus Apple's iPhones, which are also set to receive new AI features on an annual basis, as per CNBC.
Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon chip can perform AI tasks much faster than last year's processor. It reduces the time needed to generate an image from 15 seconds on last year's chip to less than a second now.
An executive with the tech company said that if a user was to buy a phone today, they would question the device's CPU speed, its memory storage, and the camera quality. Qualcomm senior vice president for mobile Alex Katouzian said that in the next two or three years, people will instead ask what kind of AI capability they can have on their new devices.
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The rise in popularity of AI technology has caused NVIDIA's stock to skyrocket but has not done much of the same for Qualcomm. This is even though the latter's smartphone chops are shipped in huge volumes and have included AI portions called NPUs since 2018.
During the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit held in Hawaii on Tuesday, the company said that the X Elite is the "most powerful computing processor" that it has ever created for the PC. It added that the new processor represents a "leap forward" in AI processing by the personal computers that people have relied on for communication, work, entertainment, and education, according to ZDNet.
Beating Competitors' Products
The company said that the X Elite features a 4nm system-on-a-chip architecture that is backed by a 12-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU. The new Oryon CPU is said to be capable of delivering up to two times faster CPU performance than its competitors.
Qualcomm claimed that with its design and all of its new features, the X Elite processor will outperform multiple Intel Core i7 processors on the Geekbench 6 benchmark. The company has also released a chart as evidence of its claim, which was not labeled in any useful way.
It said that the new chip will deliver 50% faster peak multi-thread performance when compared to Apple's M2 chip. On top of the new processor, Qualcomm also announced a new technology known as Snapdragon Seamless.
It said that this is a "cross-platform technology that enables Android, Windows, and Snapdragon devices that use other operating systems to discover each other and share information to work as one integrated system," said The Verge.
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