Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series of chipsets powers most high-end Android phones on the market. The company has now peeled the curtain back on its latest flagship processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Between the revised CPU, tweaked GPU, AI enhancements, and new camera tricks, there’s no shortage of improvements and new additions here.
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Generative AI is everywhere, and Qualcomm is taking advantage of this trend. The company says that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s upgraded Hexagon NPU is designed with generative AI in mind. Headline improvements include up to 98% faster performance than the previous generation, a 40% efficiency boost, a two-fold boost to bandwidth in large shared memory, and more bandwidth feeding the Tensor Accelerator. Whealton says it’s also implemented a separate voltage rail for the Tensor Accelerator, allowing the NPU and Tensor silicon to each run at different power levels for a better balance of performance and efficiency.
Qualcomm says the chipset supports large language models with over 10 billion parameters running at almost 15 tokens per second. So what do all these improvements mean for actual use cases?
One major benefit is that you can expect much faster image generation via Stable Diffusion. Qualcomm previously demonstrated on-device Stable Diffusion on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 reference handset, taking over 15 seconds to generate an image from a text prompt. However, the company says Stable Diffusion now takes less than a second to generate an image. The company also says it’s working with Snapchat to implement this faster Stable Diffusion solution in the app.
Another interesting addition is “on-device personalization” for AI. Qualcomm says it’ll use your device’s sensors (e.g. GPS, Wi-Fi, microphone, Bluetooth, camera) to personalize chatbot queries. So if you were to ask a chatbot about the best restaurants or activities to do, you can expect more personalized responses based on your location and other factors instead of having to explicitly specify this in your query.
Qualcomm is also touting the privacy benefits of on-device personalization. The company sought to assuage concerns that apps would have access to this personalization data. Vinesh Sukumar, Qualcomm’s head of AI and machine learning, claimed that any app using this function would only get a “refined element of the input prompt that is filtered” before it gets to the app. He added that this personalization data is discarded after a prompt is generated.
Either way, Qualcomm will showcase an AI system demo running on-device at the Snapdragon Summit, powered by Meta’s Llama 2 LLM. The company notes that this demo offers “end-to-end” voice support, so you can talk to the chatbot and have it talk back to you.
Finally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will pack support for multi-modal generative AI models. That means you can input text, images, and speech and have these generative models output text, images, and speech in return.
This improved generative AI support entails more than just better voice assistants and failed attempts at naughty AI-generated art, though.
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