During it Snapdragon AI Day which was held today in London Qualcomm gave journalists an update on what its plans are for revolutionizing the notebook world. The news presented today is absolutely not something we are hearing today for the first time. Much of it is the same news that Qualcomm announced at the Summit at the end of 2023.
During that event Qualcomm announced the specifications of Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which today we already find in various smartphones, such as oneplus 12, Nubia Z60 Ultra and samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (stay tuned because the review is coming soon). The top of the range Samsung was another protagonist of today’s day dedicated to AI. Specifically, however, these are not real innovations and, although we have not yet completed the review of the product, we have already talked to you extensively about the artificial intelligence features (1, 2, 3 and 4, for example), both on device That cloud that the new top of the range from the company can offer.
These are the first excellent results of a collaboration that will take us far. And not just the Samsung-Qualcomm couple.
Much more interesting are the words that allowed us to position the launch of the first notebook with X Elite in mid-2024. We also spoke extensively about Snapdragon never a name was more appropriate. After years of “attempts” by Qualcomm by offering ARM processors for notebooks on the market with not always top results, the company is now serious. Practically starting from scratch. Starting again from the acquisition of Nuvia, come on Oryon processors and from this Snapdragon X Elite. The promised performances are truly amazing. The comparison with apple finally makes sense and the company is optimistic in releasing information that predicts performance even superior to the latest Apple processors (even if the benchmarks shown are with M2 and not with the latest M3). There is also talk of emulation at higher levels than those that Apple guaranteed when switching to Silicon, to ensure programs written for Intel processors function correctly.
And of course he promised a lot of AI.
Today we were shown demos that concerned the generation of texts and images, extremely quickly and completely offline, specifically exploiting Meta’s Llama 2 model, which however stops at 7 billion parameters, much less than the 13 billion that X Elite could guarantee. Then there were show demos (which we were unable to film or photograph) which showed for example the removal of reflections from glasses during calls. These are obviously minor features if you think about using a laptop, but when put all together they can really give a user one more reason to choose a notebook with a Snapdragon CPU instead of a non-ARM competitor.
Obviously the number of apps available at launch (net of the fact that the promised emulation will be at the top) and the price of these devices will tip the balance. But if the various partners play their cards well, 2024 could become the year of the beginning of the revolution in the world of notebooks.
The announced partners are Acer, asus, Dell, HP, honor, lenovo, Microsoft (Surface division), Samsung and xiaomi. Basically everyone that matters in the PC world. We leave you with the article on X Elite to better understand what you can expect.
On the sidelines of the presentation Qualcomm also talked about its Snapdragon Digital Chassis platform for cars. He showed us a demo (of a real vehicle) in which the car, thanks to AI, helped us find places of interest or diagnose a problem with our car. However, the first real contact with this car is postponed to MWC 2024.
