Snapdragon sponsored my trip to Maui to see the new hardware being announced at the annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui. Qualcomm has rolled out new Snapdragon 8 for mobile and X2 Elite for Laptops that take on the competition with faster performance and lower power than x86 or other Arm-based processors, primarily Apple. Featuring the 3rd generation Oryon cores, these new Snapdragon 8 processors should ship in handsets and the new X2 Elite and Elite Extreme should ship in OEM laptops next year.
New CPU Cores, New GPU, New NPU, and a Guardian for Remote Management
It is pretty impressive that Qualcomm has already advanced to the 3rd generation Oryon cores, which out-perform the previous gen by nearly 40% and consume some 40% less power. Of course, the competition isn’t standing still, but there should be no doubt that Qualcomm has put a huge stake in the ground, and the NPU stands head and shoulders above any other PC processor for AI.
The laptop X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, like the 1st generation of compute SoCs, come complete with Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU cores that deliver the application performance needed for gaming and AI. The NPU can now deliver 80 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS), which is 78% faster than Gen 1, making it the fastest NPU in the industry.
The Snapdragon X also now includes a hardware Guardian, which enables remote support, locking, and rebooting, a nod to the enterprise adoption Qualcomm is persuing.
While speeds and feeds are critical in creating differentiation and end-user demand for a solid user experience, the evidence of that demand is the number of designs that OEMs have undertaken to bring these chips to market. Qualcomm now has nearly 150 unique designs in market today, available at thousands of retail outlets around the world. And Qualcomm has been heavily investing in getting the Snapdragon brand to be more widely known, with sponsorships at Manchester United and elsewhere to raise the Snapdragon brand recognition and preference. In fact, Snapdragon is now among the 50 top brands worldwide.
So Where Does This Leave Qualcomm?
These new processors put Qualcomm Snapdragon squarely in the lead from a specs standpoint, especially for AI, and making progress in the software needed to compete in terms of garnering support for the fast NPU. The NPU can deliver up to 220 tokens per second for a 3 billion parameter LLM. Thats a lot of horsepower for the emerging AI PC market, where Qualcomm and Microsoft are focusing a lot of engineering and marketing effort.
Disclosures: This article expresses the opinions of the author and is not to be taken as advice to purchase from or invest in the companies mentioned. My firm, Cambrian-AI Research, is fortunate to have many semiconductor firms as our clients, including Baya Systems BrainChip, Cadence, Cerebras Systems, D-Matrix, Esperanto, Flex, Groq, IBM, Intel, Micron, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Graphcore, SImA.ai, Synopsys, Tenstorrent, Ventana Microsystems, and scores of investors. I have no investment positions in any of the companies mentioned in this article. For more information, please visit our website at https://cambrian-AI.com.
