Qualcomm's presence at MWC 2024 brings many new products in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G and Wi-Fi.
At MWC Barcelona, Qualcomm announced its latest products and milestones in on-device AI, intelligent computing, and wireless connectivity, as generative AI (Gen AI) is predicted to have a major impact on many industries.
Qualcomm AI Hub
Qualcomm AI Hub provides over 75 new AI models optimized for deployment on Snapdragon devices and other Qualcomm platforms. Developers can integrate these models into their applications to accelerate time to market and reap the benefits of AI on their applications, including speed, accuracy, security, personalization, and cost savings.
The models are now available on Qualcomm AI Hub, Hugging Face, and GitHub. Developers can use them on cloud storage powered by Qualcomm platforms.
Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System
This is an advanced 5G modem-to-antenna platform that integrates many new 5G features. Specifically, this is the first modem to fully integrate NB-NTN satellite communications, supporting the connection of space networks. The dedicated tensor processor contributes to AI optimization, helping to improve throughput, quality of service (QoS), coverage, latency, bandwidth efficiency, energy efficiency, and mmWave beam management.
Qualcomm FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity
The Qualcomm FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity is the first AI-optimized system that integrates Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth, and Ultra Wideband technologies into a single chipset. AI-powered FastConnect 7900 adapts to specific applications and environments, optimizing for power consumption, latency, and network throughput.
Other company products, announcements and milestones on display at the Qualcomm Technologies booth at MWC Barcelona (Hall 3, Booth 3E10, Fira Gran Via) include:
1. Advanced artificial intelligence research
- The world's first large language model (LMM) on an Android phone — with over 7 billion parameters, can take in a wide range of input data, including text, images, creating multiple two-way conversations with an AI assistant about a single image.
- Low-level Adaptive Modeling (LoRA) — enables Gen AI to extend and enhance on-device customization across a wide range of applications — across Android phones.
- The world's first device with an LMM model with over 7 billion parameters running on a Windows PC, which can receive input text and audio data (such as music, traffic noise, etc.) and create multiple multi-talk conversations about audio.
2. New Gen AI features on phones, Windows PCs, cars, and accompanying devices.
3. Qualcomm 5G Fixed Wireless Access Ultra Gen 3 platform
4. Qualcomm Infrastructure Processor
5. Marking a milestone in world-leading wireless network research
6. Snapdragon Auto Connectivity Platform with Wi-Fi 7
At its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced a major addition to its mobile chip lineup with the Snapdragon X Elite — a processor the company calls Qualcomm's most powerful to date.
Snapdragon X Elite will elevate Windows PCs of the future.
The Snapdragon X Elite is an Arm chip that builds on last year's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 laptop chip. The company decided to change the name to reflect the performance leap of this upcoming generation. Powered by 12 Oryon cores, Qualcomm claims the X Elite offers up to two times faster CPU performance than Intel's 13th-generation Core i7-1360P and i7-1355U CPUs, while consuming up to 68% less power.
The chip is based on a 4nm design fabricated by TSMC and has a base clock speed of 3.8GHz, with a boost speed of up to 4.3GHz. The chip also includes a total cache of 42MB with a bandwidth of 136GB/s of LPDDR5x memory. Compared to the M2 chip, Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Elite has 50% faster peak multi-thread performance. And thanks to the integrated GPU, the Snapdragon X Elite is said to deliver twice the graphics performance of the Core i7-13800H at ISO levels.
The Snapdragon X Elite marks the end of the line for the previous Snapdragon 8cx series.
Qualcomm’s new AI engine also brings a significant boost to machine learning-based tasks. The combination of the Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon NPU allows the Snapdragon X Elite to achieve up to 75 TOPs of performance, which Qualcomm claims is 4.5 times faster than its competitors. The chip is also designed to run large language models with up to 13 billion local parameters.
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Elite delivers the fastest Stable Diffusion performance of any laptop chip on the market. Other features include support for AV1 4K HDR video encoding/decoding, 5G connectivity (with download speeds up to 10 Gbps), Wi-Fi 7, and a built-in Sensing Hub.
The arrival of the Snapdragon X Elite is seen as a major breakthrough for Qualcomm as it tries to better compete with rivals like Intel and especially Apple , which is switching from x86 chips to its own custom M series. The development of the chip's Oryon core has been a multi-year process following the company's acquisition of Nuvia in 2021.
