This new Qualcomm chipset is a big deal if you’re an Android phone user. Here’s why

Behind each new smartphone characteristic is a strong chipset that brings it to life. With the business shift towards on-device AI, a necessity for an much more superior and succesful system-on-a-chip (SoC) has emerged, and Qualcomm’s newest iteration goals to satisfy this. 

On Monday, at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, the corporate unveiled its latest cellular platform, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which it claims is essentially the most highly effective and quickest processor on this planet. The chip is the primary of the flagship cellular platforms beneath the brand new “Elite” branding, highlighting its improved graphical efficiency.

The brand new cellular platform is powered by a mix of a second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU, and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. The latter is integral for optimizing on-device AI duties like picture era, textual content translation, and so on.

Different key highlights of the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip embody a 24MB whole cache, 4.32 GHz CPU max frequency, 45% single-core enchancment, and 62% sooner internet shopping, promising an enhanced consumer expertise with superior processing capabilities. That is all fancy jargon to counsel that this subsequent wave of flagship Android telephones, coming as quickly as late 2024, shall be effectively geared up for the following advances in AI options.

“As we speak, our second era of the Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts in our flagship Cell Platform — it is a main leap ahead, and we anticipate shoppers to be thrilled with the brand new experiences enabled by our CPU know-how,” mentioned Chris Patrick, SVP and GM of cellular handsets at Qualcomm Applied sciences, in a press launch.

Notably, the Snapdragon 8 Elite makes multi-modal generative AI functions on Snapdragon-powered gadgets extra doable. As generative AI functions develop into extra superior, they’re evolving previous the purpose of textual content inputs and outputs. Many can now settle for multimodal knowledge, reminiscent of images, movies, and audio, for rather more context-aware help.

“It (Snapdragon 8 Elite) revolutionizes cellular experiences by providing customized, multi-modal generative AI instantly on the system, enabling the understanding of speech, context, and pictures to reinforce all the things from productiveness to creativity duties whereas prioritizing consumer privateness,” added Patrick. 

Some great benefits of on-device processing embody sooner processing velocity, as customers expertise much less latency by forgoing sending knowledge to the cloud, and elevated safety, as their knowledge by no means leaves the system. Different advantages embody minimizing vitality used at knowledge facilities, making it a extra sustainable enterprise various. 

The flagship chipset can even energy different cellular options, such because the photo-taking and photo-editing expertise, with options like AI relighting, a Video Magic Eraser, and an “AI Pet Suite. ” It’ll additionally improve gaming with CPU-intensive multiplayer video games and higher visuals throughout the board.

Qualcomm has not revealed which flagship telephones will sport the brand new chipset. Nevertheless, it did share that the Snapdragon 8 Elite shall be adopted by main producers, together with Samsung, Asus, OnePlus, Oppo, Honor, iQOO, RealMe, Redmi, and Xiaomi — with the primary system scheduled for launch within the coming weeks.

Disclosure: The price of Sabrina Ortiz’s journey to Maui, Hawaii for Qualcomm Summit was lined by Qualcomm, a typical business observe for long-distance journeys. The judgments and opinions of ZDNET’s writers and editors are all the time impartial of the businesses we cowl.