Qualcomm’s generative-AI phone processor

Qualcomm has developed a smartphone processor for on-device generative AI.

Called Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, “this platform unlocks a new era of generative AI enabling users to generate unique content, help with productivity, and other breakthrough use cases,” claimed company general manager Chris Patrick.

Certain large language (LLM) and language vision models (LVM) will be supported locally, as will transformer network-based automatic speech recognition up to 10bn parameters.

LLMs can run up to 20 token/s (7B Llama 2).

A 40% performance/W improvement in sustained AI inferencing is claimed compared with the company’s previous generation of phone processor.

The associated 64bit CPU has one 3.3GHz ‘prime’ core, likely to be Cortex-X4, five 3.2GHz ‘performance’ cores and two 2.3GHz ‘efficiency’.

On-phone gaming is another focus for this processor, which includes hardware-accelerated ray tracing and offers 240frame/s on 240Hz displays. Upscaling to 8K for external
displays is included.

Its has a 5G modem on-board, as well as Wi-Fi 7 (5.8Gbit/s peak) and Bluetooth 5.4.