There’s more to a modern-day chipset than just how many cores its CPU has, how powerful its GPU is, and how much RAM it supports. These days with the rise of AI, chipmakers need to take that into consideration as well, especially if phone makers are planning to use more on-device AI. That being said, ahead of the Snapdragon Elite Gen 6 Pro announcement, Qualcomm has shared details about its NPU.
Snapdragon Elite Gen 6 Pro NPU details revealed
For those unfamiliar, an NPU, or neural processing unit, is the part of a chip built to handle AI work. Think of tasks like image recognition, voice processing, and running AI models on your phone instead of the cloud. Qualcomm calls its version the Hexagon NPU.
So what’s changing in this new NPU? For starters, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro NPU is getting a new feature called the Element Accelerator. It sits alongside the existing scalar, vector, and tensor units. Its job is to speed up transformer models, which is what powers chatbots and AI agents.Â
Qualcomm also claims shared memory across the NPU is also going up by 50%. That’s meant to keep AI data closer to the chip instead of pulling from your phone’s RAM. The company says the setup can run Mixture-of-Experts models with up to 30 billion parameters. Prefill speeds, or how fast a model starts responding, are reportedly up to 50% faster for some models too.
What we know about the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6
Qualcomm’s set to officially unveil the lineup at the Snapdragon Summit from September 22 to 24 in Maui, Hawaii. From what we heard, the company’s reportedly splitting its flagship line into two chips this year. There’s the standard Gen 6 and the Gen 6 Pro, and both are said to use a 2nm process from TSMC.
There are obviously going to be some differences. According to the leaks, the Gen 6 Pro is getting better hardware. We’re talking about an Adreno 850 GPU and newer LPDDR6 memory. Some reports even peg peak clock speeds at 5GHz, which would be a first for a phone chip. The standard Gen 6 is expected to keep an Adreno 845 GPU and older LPDDR5X memory instead.
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