At its annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm announced a host of new products. While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip will be the talk of the town, another important part of the event was the growth of on-device AI implementation. Qualcomm believes the shift brings vital improvements like reduced costs, faster results, and increased privacy.
“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,” said 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.”
To support this statement, Qualcomm also showcased the integration of AI into its hardware design from the get-go and how it’s building for the future. We’ll focus briefly on three products at the event’s center: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, the Snapdragon X Elite, and the Qualcomm S7 Sound platform to see how they implement AI.
AI in Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Snapdragon X Elite
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Snapdragon X Elite will come with the Qualcomm AI Engine. Its addition will provide new capabilities to the devices powered by these processors, such as the ability to apply stable diffusion and generate images without pushing data onto cloud platforms.
Qualcomm also stated that the AI Engine supports large language models, large vision models, and transformer network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR), which it hopes will entice developers.
AI in Qualcomm S7 and S7 Pro Gen 1 Sound Platforms
For integrating AI in the S7 and S7 Pro Gen 1 Sound Platform, Qualcomm focussed more on the impact the technology could have on making the user experience more seamless and even delivering better audio. The use case Qualcomm mentioned involved on-device AI to enable wireless earbuds to change from one noise-cancellation mode to another without needing user input but rather depending upon the user’s environment.
