Up until now, the chips powering your computer have largely come from Intel, AMD or Apple. But Qualcomm, a company whose chips have primarily been for phones, believes its chips may start powering your computers soon too.
The reason is generative AI — hich can create text, edit photos and fill in the edges of images — that has become all the buzz in Silicon Valley thanks to ChatGPT, Bing and others. Generative AI is now being built into Qualcomm’s most powerful chips starting with the new Oryon CPU, which it says will could give your next computer a leg up.
To do this, it’s partnered with HP and other brands revealed at Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, and plan to have computers running its new chips available to buy starting in the middle of next year.
Qualcomm is touting big performance upgrades for its Snapdragon X Elite, as the chip is called. Its Oryon (pronounced like “Orion”) CPU can dual-core boost up to 4.3GHz, and it delivers up to twice the performance over competing Intel i7 10-core and 12-core processor-powered laptops while consuming a third of the power, Qualcomm says, and outpaces its 14-core i7.
On stage, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon showed a graph stating that the Qualcomm Oryon outperformed Apple’s M2 and Intel’s i9-13980HX silicon in single-threaded CPU performance, and matched their peak performance at 30% and 70% less power, respectively. The Oryon is capable of 50% faster peak multithreaded CPU performance over the Apple M2 chip.
“The Oryon CPU is the new CPU leader in mobile computing. It’s been designed by Qualcomm from the ground-up to have an unprecedented level of performance at extremely low power,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said on stage here. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
The Snapdragon X Elite’s Adreno GPU is capable of up to 4.6 teraflops of compute, and it supports external displays up to 4K at 120Hz in HDR10 with either three UHD or two 5K external displays.
But Qualcomm’s big swing is for on-device AI, and the Snapdragon X Elite — using the NPU, CPU and GPU combined — is capable of reaching 75 trillion operations per second, and can run at 45 TOPS for sustained calculations.
Qualcomm had already announced it was teaming up with Microsoft and Meta on the Llama 2 generative AI, and the X Elite chip supports 13 billion parameters for Llama 2 at up to 30 tokens per second, as well as support for the more common 7 billion parameter AI. As Qualcomm GM of mobile compute and XR Alex Katouzian pointed out, humans can only read about 200 to 300 words per minute which corresponds to five to seven tokens per second.
“Our on-device AI can write faster than you can read,” Katouzian said.
