Expected Performance and Status of Qualcomm’s Next Mobile Chip: Predictions from Leaked Spectroscopy (Preliminary Update)
Qualcomm’s new flagship mobile chipset is an on-device AI fest from top to bottom. Borrowing from cloud service providers, the generative artificial intelligence capabilities within the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 greatly speeding up the processing-intensive activities that are usually delegated to the cloud. It’s one more leap forward in a year that has seen a lot of leaping when it comes to AI, and it will come sooner than later: the first phones with the new chipset are expected to debut in the coming weeks.
The first quarter of the century is when this chip is expected to be in theGalaxy S line. As Qualcomm’s flagship mobile chip, it’ll appear in other top-of-the-line Android phones throughout the year, with the notable exception of Google’s Pixel line, which relies on the company’s own Tensor processors. Qualcomm’s AI focus makes the stakes high for Google to do a good job with its Tensor chips since its ability to develop custom AI features is a key reason the company decided to move away from Qualcomm.
You can see the whole sheet of leaked specifications. The chip should be announced tomorrow at the summit. The company is hosting an event starting October 24th at 3AM ET / 12AM PT.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: An Open Platform to Connect Android and Windows Devices via Chatbots and Stable Diffusion on-Device
The 8 Gen 3 supports a chatbot trained on Meta’s Llama 2, and it can accept text, image, and voice input. It can also talk back to you as well as generate an image or text. The chipset also runs the AI image generator Stable Diffusion on-device, something that Qualcomm demoed earlier this year. The company says it can make an image in less than one second, which is still faster than it takes to make an image on a well-equipped laptop.
All of this is housed in what Qualcomm calls its AI engine, utilizing the company’s Hexagon neural processor. Meanwhile, the Sensing Hub uses OpenAI’s Whisper for speech recognition. The location information of the user, as well as the information supplied by the Sensing Hub, is used for more personalized responses. It will let you know your age, fitness level, and favorite activities.
Vloggers view is a feature that puts video from the selfies and rear cameras together into one view. It’s not a picture-in-picture thing — this feature uses improved image segmentation to remove the background from the selfie video to make it look like you’re standing in front of whatever your rear camera sees.
There’s good reason to be concerned about the misuse of these tools, and to that end, Qualcomm is working with a company called Truepic. The tech it’s using is compliant with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s open standard, which is kind of like metadata to guarantee the authenticity of a photo or video. The digital asset can’t be tampered with as easily as EXIF data can.
It is possible to pair laptops and phones with peripherals even if they are from different manufacturers, thanks to the new system called “Steele Seamless”. Qualcomm says this will enable easier switching between devices — like switching to audio to your PC for a video call and back to music playing on your phone, for example.
This seems mainly aimed at getting Android and Windows devices talking to each other more easily, at least at launch. Qualcomm says it’s an open platform that anyone can join, although initially the technology will be largely accessed by Qualcomm’s direct OEM and OS partners. Every garden has to start somewhere — even an open one.