Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit Live Blog: Compute Spotlight

03:57PM EDT – External QC Snapdragon 5G modems

03:57PM EDT – X Elite brings the best of Qualcomm’s mobile tech to the PC

03:56PM EDT – Users asking their phones to do more and more has driven so much of the innovation in Snapdragon

03:56PM EDT – And now switching over to talking about user experiences

03:55PM EDT – HP is very excited about all of this

03:54PM EDT – On-device local AI inference will bring new benefits

03:52PM EDT – Now for another partner showcase. HP

03:51PM EDT – The Hexagon NPU shows up in the Task Manager on Windows

03:51PM EDT – (Checking the notes, it looks like this is an NPU vs. CPU comparison)

03:50PM EDT – UL Procyon benchmarks. Upwards of 10x faster than Intel/AMD chips

03:49PM EDT – 50% faster AI compute performance on the GPU as well

03:49PM EDT – 45 TOPS of AI performance

03:48PM EDT – And Qualcomm’s secret sauce of micro tile inferencing

03:48PM EDT – (The tensor cores are on their own rail)

03:48PM EDT – New power delivery system for the NPU

03:48PM EDT – Over 2.5x faster with SD 1.5. More with highly optimized versions

03:47PM EDT – Stable diffusion benchmarks

03:47PM EDT – And with a smaller 7B model, X Elite can run at 30 tokens per second

03:47PM EDT – Support for AI models over 13B parameters

03:46PM EDT – Qualcomm has invested significant resources (and seemingly die space) on including a faster NPU

03:45PM EDT – Now on to AI performance

03:45PM EDT – (Getting a native version of Resolve on Windows is a big win for Qualcomm. That is arguably the most important video editing tool on the market. It doesn’t hurt that they offer the base version for free, either)

03:44PM EDT – And they’re not done optimizing Resolve or adding new AI-based capabilities

03:44PM EDT – Briefly talking about performance versus a 12 core (Intel) processor

03:43PM EDT – Blackmagic has been working with Qualcomm to make this happen

03:43PM EDT – Blackmagic will be launching a native Arm version of Resolve next year for Windows

03:43PM EDT – Voice isolation, dialogue leveler, and more

03:42PM EDT – And Resolve has a suite of AI-based abilities these days

03:42PM EDT – Resolve is a complete video editing, grading, and post-production tool

03:41PM EDT – Demo time with Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve

03:41PM EDT – (Sounds like out-of-band display driver updates, separate from what MS distributes?)

03:40PM EDT – First Snapdragon compute platform with updatable drivers

03:40PM EDT – 2x peak performance, or iso-performance at 23% of the power

03:39PM EDT – Now on to the GPU

03:38PM EDT – 2x faster performance at the same power

03:38PM EDT – Cinebench results

03:38PM EDT – Ultraportables up to large format laptops

03:37PM EDT – X Elite is designed to work in a range of laptop designs

03:37PM EDT – “A sophisticated branch predictor”

03:36PM EDT – 42MB of total cache. Optimizations for virtualization and memory address translation

03:35PM EDT – First Arm architecture CPU to hit over 4GHz

03:35PM EDT – Or 2C turbo up to 4.3GHz

03:35PM EDT – Tri-cluster design, 4 cores each. Up to 3.8GHz under normal circumstances

03:34PM EDT – Wanted to deliver the ultimate performance without compromising on power efficiency

03:34PM EDT – Recapping the Oryon announcement

03:34PM EDT – “A massive leap above anything else in its class”

03:33PM EDT – Users want a sleek form factor with good battery life. And Snapdragon X Elite can deliver that

03:32PM EDT – Starting with Snapdragon X Elite

03:31PM EDT – And now we’re getting to the technical dive

03:31PM EDT – Delivering good experiences for users requires working closely with partners like Honor and Zoom

03:30PM EDT – Lauding the hardware encode capabilities of Qualcomm’s SoCs

03:29PM EDT – (Thus far this has been more of a partner showcase than a compute spotlight)

03:29PM EDT – And rolling a video from Zoom

03:29PM EDT – Now talking about Zoom and video calling

03:28PM EDT – And that’s Honor. Now back to Kedar

03:27PM EDT – Honor will also be making a Snapdragon X Elite-based laptop

03:26PM EDT – And confirmed, it’s Snapdragon Seamless-based

03:25PM EDT – Sharing keyboard and mouse from the laptop over to the unfolded phone

03:24PM EDT – Also demoing “MagicRing” multi-device sharing (based on Snapdragon Seamless, I’d expect)

03:23PM EDT – 8 Gen 3 based phone

03:22PM EDT – Announcing Magic 6

03:21PM EDT – In this case the AI is selecting for things such as the person to be in the videos, whether they’re smiling, what they’re doing (dancing), etc

03:19PM EDT – And showing a demo of AI in action. Having a local model collate videos and cut them together

03:18PM EDT – 6 to 7 billion parmeters is needed to get a useful on-device AI. 1 billion parameters is “just a toy”

03:16PM EDT – On device AI performance is getting better quickly, thanks to recent hardware improvements such as Qualcomm’s updated NPU

03:16PM EDT – And where to draw the line between on-device and cloud processing. Privacy versus performance

03:14PM EDT – And, of course, Honor is big on developing more AI uses for smartphones

03:13PM EDT – Or playing the same game with two instances/accounts at once

03:12PM EDT – Each space can have its own WhatsApp accounts

03:11PM EDT – Now discussing some of the phone’s features, such as parallel spaces

03:10PM EDT – 5000 mAh battery

03:10PM EDT – 4.7mm when unfolded

03:09PM EDT – 9.9mm thick

03:09PM EDT – Discussing the Honor Magic V2 foldable phone

03:09PM EDT – Honor has been a major partner of Qualcomm. They’ve made many, many devices based on Qualcomm’s hardware

03:08PM EDT – But it’s also an era of potential. AI models, battery technology, and more

03:07PM EDT – Honor has a lot of talent. But innovation is slowing down. There are a lot of challenges

03:07PM EDT – Honor’s CEO is now on the stage

03:06PM EDT – Starting with Honor

03:06PM EDT – (This keynote is scheduled to go for 3 hours. We’ll just be covering the X Elite and 8 Gen 3 sections, which are first)

03:05PM EDT – Snapdragon Seemless multi-device connectivity

03:05PM EDT – Qualcomm S7 Pro audio ASIC

03:04PM EDT – Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

03:04PM EDT – Snapdragon X Elite

03:04PM EDT – Recapping yesterday’s big 4 announcements

03:01PM EDT – Starting with an intro video. “The PC is not enough”

03:01PM EDT – And here we go. Qualcomm’s day two keynote is kicking off

We’re here in sunny Hawaii for day two of Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit.

Yesterday, of course, was the company’s prime keynote, where they announced their forthcoming Snapdragon X Elite SoC for laptops, as well as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for smartphones. As well, the company gave us our first look at their Oryon CPU architecture, which will be driving the X Elite, and eventually Qualcomm’s smartphones, automotive chips, and more.

For day two of their event, today Qualcomm is going to take us through the technical side of their new chips, revealing a bit more about how they work and what new features and abilities have been added in this generation. So please join us for our live blog coverage of Qualcomm’s technical track disclosures.