Qualcomm (QCOM.US) unveils the next-generation SoC Snapdragon 8 Plus: featuring its own Oryon CPU and NPU performance up to 12 times
Qualcomm (QCOM.US) on Monday unveiled its latest flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (Snapdragon 8 Elite), a chip that gives smartphones notebook-class performance to help these devices take advantage of new artificial intelligence tools.
Qualcomm said its latest Snapdragon series would include its in-house Oryon processor design, which the company said would be 45% faster than the previous generation and more power efficient.
Qualcomm's products dominate the market for mobile devices running on Android, making the company's technology updates a key part of the competition between many global smartphone manufacturers and Apple (AAPL.US).
This time, Qualcomm decided to return to in-house processor designs as part of CEO Cristiano Amon's increased investment in homegrown technologies. The Snapdragon series became more reliant on Arm (ARM.US) designs under the previous leadership.
Oryon was developed by an engineering team Amon brought in when Qualcomm acquired startup Nuvia, which has become the core of the company's X Elite chips for notebook sales.
Notebooks with X Elite chips support artificial intelligence, a term widely used for "AI PCs," which software maker Microsoft (MSFT.US) has used as a way to show off its new AI capabilities. The chip also poses a threat to Intel's (INTC.US) dominance in the PC processor market.
Smartphones based on the new Snapdragon will also be able to run software based on generative AI on the device itself, Qualcomm said, with capabilities up to 12 times faster than before. The company said the chip uses a new Hexagon NPU to support the largest generative AI ecosystem in the world.