Windows PCs have been powered by ARM-based chips for years, but the OS is still maturing in contrast to decades of X86 improvements. Still, Qualcomm hasn’t stopped rolling out ever more powerful laptop chips, like his Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 of the current generation. Dedicated AI processing.
An x86 system has two processing pipelines. CPU and GPU. Running AI-intensive tasks will result in high CPU and GPU resource consumption and high power consumption. The Snapdragon chip, on the other hand, has a Hexagon digital signal processor that excels at AI tasks. Snapdragon chips are designed to intelligently offload tasks to AI engines to free up resources.
Executives from Microsoft, Adobe, and Citi attended the Snapdragon Summit to support Qualcomm’s low-power platform with onboard dedicated accelerator cores. Microsoft has pointed to his partnership with Qualcomm on his SQ3 chipset for the new Surface Pro 9 5G. It includes many AI-enhanced features such as Windows Studio voice focus, background blur, auto framing, eye contact correction, and more.
Adobe previously added support for Snapdragon AI computing to its Sensei machine learning tools, accelerating performance in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro. In 2023, more Creative Cloud apps will benefit from his Snapdragon AI processing. Citi has nothing to say to consumers, but it appears he plans to shift his 70% of his workforce to his Qualcomm mobile computing products such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. .
Most of the current Snapdragon chips rely on Qualcomm’s Kryo branded CPU cores. Previous Kryo cores were custom architectures, then switched to off-the-shelf ARM Cortex designs. Qualcomm provided a teaser of its upcoming mobile CPU called Oryon.
The SoC is the first CPU design the company has acquired from Nuvia and could power the company’s next-generation Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4. Qualcomm Oryon will also adopt a custom CPU architecture based on the Arm instruction set, which it does not. Must be off-the-shelf Arm core architecture. The company has promised to bring its products to the market from 2023.
