Qualcomm Unveiled New Chips for Mobile and PC Platforms

Qualcomm announced a lot of news at its Snapdragon Summit this week. Those include more powerful chipsets, Android on PCs, and a timeline for 6G device testing.

Company CEO and president Cristiano Amon started the conference by stating that agentic AI will create an “ecosystem of you” across smart glasses, mobile devices, and connected cars. “We’re going to make this tech, which is already very personal, into the most personal technology ever,” Amon stated. The heart of Qualcomm’s proposition is the idea that the way humans interact with technology is going to change from using many apps to interacting with a single agent on their devices.

Amon said 6G is designed to be the connection between the cloud and the edge devices. He explained the difference between 5G and 6G is the network of intelligence connecting the edge and the cloud, merging the physical and the digital, providing connected experiences. “We are ready to have pre-commercial devices ready with 6G as early as 2028,” he said.

“In the past, we’ve always had very different systems between what we’re building on PCs and what we’re building on smartphones, and we’ve embarked on a project to combine that,” said Rick Osterloh, Google’s head of platforms and devices. “We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems.”

He explained Google plans to bring Gemini and the full Android AI stack, along with all of their applications and developer community, into the PC ecosystem, which will be another way Android will be able to serve everyone in every computing category. “I’ve seen it,” Amon responded. “It is incredible. It delivers on the vision of the convergence of mobile and PC. I can’t wait to have one.”

Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, which is its latest flagship SoC. It follows last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC but under a new branding scheme. It comes equipped with a third-generation Oryon CPU with boosted single- and multi-core performance. The chip’s Hexagon NPU marks a 37% improvement in overall performance and 16% improvement in efficiency over the previous generation and comes with an emphasis on personalised, on-device AI experiences. Qualcomm’s premium chip will be available on devices over the coming days from OEMs such as Honor, OnePlus, Samsung, Sony, Vivo, and Xiaomi.

On the PC front, Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Snapdragon X2 Elite chips to compete against Intel and AMD in the Windows ecosystem. The new processors are equipped with third-gen Oryon CPU with up to 18 cores onboard, six more than their predecessors. Qualcomm claims that the X2 Elite Extreme gets up to 39% faster peak single-core performance and 50% multi-core performance improvement compared to the previous generation. The chipmaker stated the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme has up to 75% faster CPU performance than the competition at ISO power.