Qualcomm said Monday that it is translating technology originally developed for its laptop chips to its cellphone chips, to make them more powerful for generative AI tasks.
The San Diego-based company is the world’s leading seller of cell phone chips. To expand its business, it hired a group of former Apple engineers in 2021 to help it design laptop chips, which went on sale this year and help power AI functions in Microsoft’s Windows system.
Today, the technology developed by that team – a set of custom computing technologies that Qualcomm has dubbed “Oryon” – is being integrated into the company’s cell phone chips for the first time.
The company also reworked parts of the chip, called Snapdragon 8 Elite, to handle tasks like image and text generation. Qualcomm will offer software developers special tools, in addition to those already available in Alphabet’s Android operating system, to exploit these parts of the chip.
“AI is one of the areas where I think Google is moving quickly, but we have our own technology to offer to the end developer,” Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s senior vice president and general manager for AI, told Reuters. mobile phones.
Qualcomm said Samsung Electronics, Asustek Computer and Xiaomi, among others, would use the new chip.
