‘Snapdragon is everywhere’: Biggest takeaways from Day 1 of Snapdragon Summit 2024
Snapdragon Summit 2024 is Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.’s way of teeing up the big advancements for the coming 12 months, and if Day 1 is any indication, we’re in for a wild 2025.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon kicked things off by laying out his vision for the role Snapdragon plays in how we will navigate the increasingly connected world around us, including a transformation in how we’ll interact with artificial intelligence and computing.
“We’re about to see the next big change,” Amon said during his keynote to a packed, standing room audience. “I want to show you this vision, how fundamentally we think about applications and user experience will change in a big way with [generative] AI, and that’s one of the key focuses of Snapdragon now and into the future.”
The big announcement of the day was the introduction of the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor and the incorporation of the powerful second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU, representing a massive leap in the mobile industry.
Monday’s session also touched upon artificial intelligence (AI) and spatial computing, boasting guests such as Dr. TM Roh, president of Samsung Electronics’ MX business. But it’s clear that your phone — and the kind of capabilities it will have in the coming year — was the focus of Day 1.
When looking into the future of technology, there are few better crystal balls than Snapdragon Summit. The announcements and advancements shown off here in Maui over the next few days set the tone for the broader direction of digital evolution, from what you’ll be able to do on your next phone to what you’ll see through extended reality (XR) glasses.
Here are the biggest stories from Day 1 of the conference:
Qualcomm Oryon makes the leap to mobile with Snapdragon 8 Elite
Qualcomm Oryon is a custom-designed, record-breaking CPU built on a 3nm process technology that has already made waves in computing with the Snapdragon X Series and Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs. Now, Qualcomm Technologies is bringing that power to the smartphone with a second-generation version of Qualcomm Oryon.
Alex Katouzian, group general manager of mobile, compute and XR for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which delivers 45% improvement in performance1 and 44% improvement in power efficiency from the prior generation.2
“The 8 Elite delivers industry-leading performance for the experiences that matter the most,” Katouzian said.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite name signals that this is more than just a system on a chip (SoC), but a platform for innovation on the mobile side.
Why Snapdragon 8 Elite matters
Every year, Qualcomm Technologies introduces a new iteration of its flagship processor that’s faster, more powerful and more energy efficient. But the incorporation of Qualcomm Oryon into Snapdragon 8 Elite isn’t just power for power’s sake.
The performance boost will be necessary to power increasingly sophisticated AI tasks on device. Qualcomm Technologies believes in a hybrid approach where AI calculations are either performed using the device’s hardware or on through the cloud. But handling more tasks on the device means a responsive and privacy-enhanced experience.
Qualcomm Technologies demonstrated this capability by showing off a multi-modal virtual assistant using both a camera and voice for input while letting you converse with it in a natural conversation.
Other features include enabling a smoother gaming experience, magical video and photo editing tricks and enhanced photo-taking capabilities. Attendees even had the opportunity to have these experiences first-hand at Snapdragon City, an augmented reality (AR)-enhanced demo table that immersed users into Snapdragon 8 Elite’s features and capabilities.
Leading the charge on XR and AI computing
“We’ve been a leader in the XR space for over a decade now,” Katouzian said, noting Snapdragon powers more than 80 XR devices. From virtual reality to AR, Snapdragon has been at center of many of these experiences.
Alex Himel, Vice President of Wearables and Augmented Reality for Meta, came on stage to talk about some upcoming capabilities for the social media giant’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.
“People are increasingly using the Ray-Bans for more than just taking calls and shooting photos and videos, and are starting to embrace AI,” Himel said. As a result, Meta has been working on a few simple experiences to take advantage of AI to help more people ease into the different use cases.
There are three that will roll out by the end of the year:
- The first is text actions, which lets you look at a phone number and ask your glasses to make a call.
- The second is reminders, which Himel said you can use to look at your car in a parking garage and later ask it to remind you where you parked.
- Lastly, you’ll have video multimodal AI capabilities, which lets you open a “session” where you’re trying to perform a task and use the AI to complete it, whether it’s using a new recipe in a meal or change your tires for the first time.
Himel also talked about Meta’s first AR glasses, Orion, and stated that the company would continue to roll out new styles of glasses, new software and new hardware with additional capabilities.
Compute gets some NPU-powered tricks
On the PC side, Katouzian talked about the success of the CoPilot+ PCs and what’s next in the world of computing.
We also announced more programs that were taking advantage of the Snapdragon X Series to make the most of their experiences. Blender, a popular free-to-use 3D modeling software, now has native Qualcomm Oryon CPU support for enhanced performance and battery life. Additionally, we created a plugin to simulate rendering on the NPU, letting you create higher-quality 2D images with text-to-image AI.
Additionally, Microsoft is bringing Midi 2.0 support for Windows on Snapdragon and a driver to support low latency audio hardware, part of a broader array of announcements that will benefit creators and artists using computing devices with Snapdragon processors.
Our partners shine
Xiaomi will be the first to embrace Snapdragon Elite 8. Adam Zeng, Senior Vice President and group president of the smartphone department for the Chinese handset maker, took the stage at Snapdragon Summit to announce that its next flagship, Xiaomi 15 Series, will be the first smartphone to run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. He boasted that with the new mobile platform, the Xiaomi 15’s power consumption is down 30% while its peak temperature has been lowered by three degrees when compared with the last-generation model.
"This marks a new starting point with our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies,” Zeng said, adding that the Xiaomi 15 Series phone will launch at the end of October.
Also preparing a launch is Honor Device Co., Ltd. Ray Guo, Chief Marketing Officer of Honor, unveiled the Honor AI Agent, which he said would lead the industry into the era of the “autopilot” assistant. Guo demonstrated the AI Agent’s ability to automatically pull up and cancel your subscriptions and order a drink for you — all by speaking to the digital assistant.
He also touted that it would get smarter over time as you interacted more with it. “The longer you use it, the better it will perform,” he said. He gave the audience a sneak peak at the Honor Magic7 phone, which will run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite platform, and said to stay tuned for its official launch on Oct. 30.
Pavan Davaluri, vice president, Windows+ devices, Microsoft, dropped by to talk about the kinds of experiences it’s building on top of the powerful Snapdragon platform and expressed his excitement for the holiday line-up of Snapdragon X Elite-powered Copilot+ PCs. “We’re excited with the momentum with developers that are building on this platform,” he said.
More to come on Day 2
The beaches of Maui are still buzzing from Day 1 alone. From the benchmarking of the second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU to the cheers for the Snapdragon Insiders shout out, the audience was pumped on Monday. Still yet, we are on the edge of our seats to see what Snapdragon Summit has in store for Day 2. Stay tuned.
