Qualcomm revamps mobile phone chips for AI, signs Samsung and others

Qualcomm said on Monday it is bringing technology first developed for its laptop chips to its mobile phone chips, aiming to make them more powerful for generative AI tasks.

The San Diego-based company is the world’s biggest seller of mobile phone chips. In an effort to expand its business, the company in 2021 hired a group of ex-Apple engineers to help it design laptop chips, which went on sale this year and are helping power AI features in Microsoft’s Windows.

Now, the technology developed by that team – a set of custom computing technology Qualcomm has branded “Oryon” – is being put into the company’s mobile phone chips for the first time.

The company has also re-worked the parts of the chip, which is called the Snapdragon 8 Elite, to handle tasks such as generating images and text. Qualcomm will offer software developers special tools beyond the ones already available in Alphabet’s Android operating system to tap into those parts of the chip.

“AI has been one of those where I think Google is moving fast, but we have our own technology to offer that end developer,” Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s senior vice president and general manager for mobile handsets, told Reuters.

Qualcomm said Samsung Electronics, Asustek Computer and Xiaomi, among several others, will use the new chip.