As AI penetrates every product in the tech market, Qualcomm is making the case that the chipsets powering AI experiences need to evolve to power the shift.

On Tuesday at its annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm launched its most advanced chipsets, which most Android smartphone manufacturers, including giants like Samsung, will use to power next year's devices. It unveiled two new Snapdragon platforms: Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6. The former will power the most advanced flagship phones, while the latter will be embedded in a broader range of smartphones with more moderate price tags.

In the keynote, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said that while the smartphone will remain a cornerstone of people's everyday lives in the age of AI, the way people interact with it will change. "Your phone is not going anywhere, but now we can see clearly how your phone is going to interact with those new agentic experiences—how we're going to have the coexistence of the old and the new," said Amon.

The new chipset supports truly ambient agentic experiences in which people can use their phones for agentic orchestration of tasks with as little friction. To make that possible, the chipset needs to optimize for efficiency, delivering longer battery life, parallel GPU processing, improved connectivity, and more. As a result, with the new chipsets, Qualcomm promises:

• Agentic performance: Faster, more powerful agent performance via Qualcomm's most advanced Qualcomm AI Engine, which includes the Qualcomm Oryon CPU, the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, and enhanced Qualcomm Sensing Hub.
• Camera: At Snapdragon Summit every year, we usually get a preview of the next cutting-edge Android camera features, including the new chips' deeper scene understanding, enhanced image and video capture quality, and more.
• Sound: Similarly, the chipsets help power superior sound capture and transmission. The 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 Mobile platform specifically supports features such as AI Voice Bubble technology that distinguishes voices from ambient noise.
• Connectivity: Both chipsets take advantage of a newly architected, AI-powered Qualcomm X105 5G Modem-RF to ensure stronger connections in more places.

While at launch, Qualcomm can't announce all the flagship phones that will be powered by the new platforms, it did mention it will power flagship smartphones from global OEMs including Honor, Xiaomi, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Redmi, RedMagic, Vivo, and iQOO. It also announced some of the first ones, including the Motorola Signature 27, which will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.

Our Deeper View

While chipsets are not the flashiest topics to learn about, they are responsible for bringing new AI features to your devices. The more advanced these chips get, the more they can do things such as enabling your phone to not rely on the cloud, not overheat, and not lag. Qualcomm has steadily improved its chipsets year over year to enable devices to deliver what the AI era demands, being able to tout impressive numbers such as on-device support for up to 30-billion-parameter MoE models on the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. That's huge since most phones have been limited to running about 4B parameter models on-device. Qualcomm is also well positioned to compete in the AI devices market, as their chipsets are consistently used to power the entire ecosystem of AI devices, including smartglasses, such as the Meta Ray-Bans, XR devices, such as the Snap Specs, and smartwatches, such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9.

Disclaimer: Sabrina Ortiz's travel to Snapdragon Summit was paid for by Qualcomm. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.