Qualcomm launches two new smartphone chips with emphasis on AI

Qualcomm today announced two flagship smartphone processors, called Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, with a focus on facilitating better AI-focused features.

At its annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm said that the new chips can aid in improved personalization for AI agents. The chips have new sensing hubs that can run small models of up to 200 million parameters. With the new sensing hub, smartphones can run a personal scribe locally and differentiate between speakers. Plus, it can build memory based on your usage for better suggestions for automating tasks. The company said that it can run a complete voice-in and voice-out agent through the new chip.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 has a new accelerator element that’s designed to run models in a more efficient way. The high-end Extreme version can run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model locally. This means that while the overall model size is 30B, the model only activates a certain number of parameters for a particular task.

For comparison, at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June, Apple released a 20-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, the most advanced of its third generation of foundation models.