Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
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Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset.
It features the Qualcomm Oryon CPU and next-gen Qualcomm Adreno GPU.
The results include the fastest on-device AI processing.
In the AI-first world we live in, helpful AI features matter more and more to smartphone buyers. As a result, chipsets behind these devices have to become increasingly powerful to support these features, and Qualcomm's new chipset just upped the ante.
In a conversation with Durga Malladi, SVP and GM of technology planning, edge solutions, and data center at Qualcomm, he told me that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 supports up to 220 tokens per second when using a 3B parameter small language model. These stats make the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 the fastest mobile SoC for running reasoning models on-device, compared to other published numbers.
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"If you just think about it, we went from close to 20 to this, it's like a 10x increase in the tokens per second that you get now," said Malladi. "I can't read 200 words per second. None of us can."
I spoke with Malladi on Wednesday, after Qualcomm unveiled its newest mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, at its annual Snapdragon Summit. The launch emphasized its capability to fuel even more advanced AI experiences that offer improvements in photography, videography, audio, gaming, and, of course, AI-inferencing.
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Tokens per second refer to the amount of information that AI models can intake or process in a given amount of time. The more tokens that a model can process at a time, the faster users can experience and perform more complex tasks on-device. On-device is particularly important as it no longer contributes to lower latency but also increases privacy as it keeps information on the device, bypassing the cloud.
"It's something that can be used to very quickly go from [if] you just had a PDF, maybe in one language, and you just wanted to translate it literally instantaneously, to some other language. That can be done in a really fast way," Malladi said.
Disclosure: The cost of Sabrina Ortiz's travel to Maui, Hawaii, for the Snapdragon Summit was covered by Qualcomm, a common industry practice for long-distance trips. The judgments and opinions of ZDNET's writers and editors are always independent of the companies we cover.