Snapdragon Summit 2024: PC, mobile reach AI first inflection point

Cycle of innovation

Driven by the innovations happening in AI, regarded as one of the biggest disruptors in computing, the company, said Amon, wanted to introduce the concept of computing spaces where GenAI is changing the computing experience of what happens at the edge, and how that can create a disruption in the cycle of innovation – what he said would create a new generation of AI-first experiences.

“We’re about to see the next big change,” he said. “It’s incredible what you see with [Gen AI] models, but there’s another thing beyond having well-trained models. Computers now can understand the language of humans. Computers can now communicate like humans communicate. And what that does, it changes how we think about the experience that you have on computers … fundamentally, how we think about applications and user experience is about to change in a big way with GenAI, and that’s one of the key focus [areas] of Snapdragon now and into the future.

“So, we have this construct that we’re now very used to, which is an app-centred experience. [Now] each application and use case has the potential to be changed, and how we think about AI ... the machines can understand human language. That’s going to be completely redefined, and we’re going to see new experiences. It’s so clear to us how mobile is going to change. Experience is going to change, and we’re just going to see a revolution enabled by AI for experiences.”

Putting this revolution into the context of the devices that will be equipped with the new Snapdragon products, Alex Katouzian, group general manager of mobile, compute and XR (MCX), stressed that people live in a multi-device world and that it was a plain fact that soon people’s devices will gain new levels of understanding. Moreover, he said the PC industry had reached a tipping point.

“The human-to-machine interface is changing, and becoming more intuitive and interactive,” he said. “You will have interactions that are more seamless, personalised and more helpful than ever before. All mobile attributes that consumers value – high performance, multi-day battery life on device AI, great multimedia, thin form factor – are all necessary for the new AI, PC era.”

Mobile platform

The bedrock for this new era, said Katouzian, was the Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform, which Qualcomm said offers the world’s fastest mobile CPU and is the “the most powerful and world’s fastest” mobile system-on-a-chip ever.

The platform sees the introduction of technologies such as the second-generation custom-built Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU and enhanced Hexagon NPU, all of which, said Qualcomm, deliver “game-changing” performance improvements. These include personalised, multi-modal on-device generative AI, enabling the understanding of speech, context and images to enhance use cases such as business productivity.

The cornerstone for making this revolution happen, Amon noted, will be the partnerships that Qualcomm has already created with the IT industry’s leaders, such as Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI. In a video message to the event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella insisted that there was “no question” that the industry has entered a new age of computing, and AI at the edge was becoming even more important.

“Up until now, scaling laws have helped us build and serve powerful language models in the cloud, but today, we are going beyond the cloud to the edge, removing fundamental constraints of power and space, reducing latency, and always ensuring privacy and security,” he said.

“This will require collaboration and innovation from cloud to the edge to deliver these breakthrough solutions and improve people’s productivity and creativity, and that’s why our long-standing partnership with Qualcomm is so important. Together, Microsoft and Qualcomm are working on software, hardware tools to deliver CoPilot experiences that empower consumers and enterprises on every device in this new era.”

Just as Katouzian predicted that the technology now existed to drive an inflection point for the PC market, Amon observed that a similar prospect was due in spatial computing, bringing AI first experiences across all computing spaces. In these, the CEO pointed to the existing partnership with Meta to develop what he said would be the reality behind the next computing platform, understanding the power of mixed reality (MR) and Meta reality.

“We started early with Meta, and we have done incredible work together with the Meta Quest products, and I think it’s just getting started,” he said. “This is another great partnership. It’s one that is not only based on what we have been doing in spatial computing, but also the potential of an AI-first experience, especially with Llama, and the great work that Meta is doing across their apps.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg added: “Together, we are pushing the boundaries of what is possible with AI mixed reality and wearables. On the AI front, we brought our cutting-edge model of Llama 3.2 to devices that contain Snapdragon platforms. That includes our multi-modal 11 billion-parameter model along with smaller 1 billion-/3 billion-parameter models that are optimised to run on device. Being able to run Llama on device is a huge opportunity for the mobile industry. We can move more processing to the edge for AI experiences that are richer and more responsive across modalities with added privacy benefits. And this AI work adds to a long-standing partnership in the mixed reality space that dates all the way back to Oculus Go.

“We’ve since teamed up on customised mixed reality chipsets – powered by Snapdragon XR platforms and technology – to power our quest products, including the new Meta Quest 3s that we just launched,” he said. “And we’re continuing to partner on integrations across our wearable products, including our Ray-Ban Meta-AI smart glasses. This partnership is unlocking powerful, immersive experiences that are going to shape the future of human connection.”

Amon said it was easy to see the excitement in how AI is going to fundamentally change everything, and that the industry was just at the beginning of a big revolution. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the conference that since the company launched its ChatGPT product two years ago, the world had changed in some “remarkable” ways as each week, 250 million people used the company’s flagship product.

“We’re working on making models way more capable,” he said. “[People will] be able to understand text and images and sounds across multiple languages, multiple modalities, together in real time. Our latest system, OpenAI o1, can now spend more time thinking before it responds, so it can reason through complex tasks and solve, in some cases, very hard problems. This is just a step towards building truly intelligent assistants that are more natural helping navigate the world.”

“On-device AI can enforce privacy guarantees, and enhance immediacy and reliability in AI experiences,” said Altman. “We’re just at the beginning of what AI can do as we keep pushing the limits; I’m really excited about how cloud and on-device AI are going to come together and unlock new possibilities. This is going to put more powerful intelligence and tools in more people’s hands, and ultimately it’ll make businesses more productive, help solve problems faster and unlock new ways to be creative.”

The tangible fruits of the work done by Qualcomm could be seen with the attendance at the Snapdragon summit of three of the biggest Asian device manufacturers, namely T M Roh, president mobile eXperience business at Samsung Electronics; Adan Zeng, SVO and president of international business department at Xiaomi; and Ray Guo, chief marketing officer at Honor Device. Whilst the Korean giant did not have any specific products to show, the latter two Chinese firms revealed that they would be bringing out by the end of October mobile devices based on Snapdragon 8 Elite, namely the Xiaomi 15 Series and Honor Magic 7 respectively.

Concluding, Amon said he had conviction about this future, not only in what Qualcomm said and not only about what Snapdragon is going to enable, but in terms of the major AI companies in the world who were with Qualcomm thinking about this future.

Potentially key for businesses was that the advances change the role of computing. Firms will be able to choose their favourite agent, trained in the language they want, one that is more suitable to the company in terms of productivity. “It’s an incredible future we have ahead of us,” said Amon. “The best of technology is still ahead. And Snapdragon is going to be front and centre and making that a reality; it’s about delivering tomorrow’s experiences today. It’s about making the impossible inevitable.”