“The future of generative AI is hybrid, with on-device intelligence working together with the cloud to provide greater personalization, privacy, reliability and efficiency. Connectivity is critical to help generative AI scale and extend across the cloud, edge, and device, and AI solutions are enabling us to deliver next gen connectivity that can support this era of Generative AI,” said Cristiano Amon, president and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated. “As the company driving intelligent computing everywhere, we are enabling the ecosystem to develop and commercialize generative AI use cases, experiences, and leading products across device categories, including smartphones, next-gen PCs, XR devices, vehicles, robotics and more.
AI is the future and Qualcomm AI Hub makes it easy for developers
The newly announced Qualcomm AI Hub is actually a library of over 75 pre-optimized AI models that can be easily deployed on devices powered by Snapdragon platforms, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate those same models into applications. Available on the Qualcomm AI Hub, Hugging Face, and GitHub, developers will be able to run the models with only a few lines of code on cloud-hosted devices powered by Qualcomm platforms.
In addition, with AI Hub, Qualcomm now enables AI commercialization across a whole range of devices, including PCs, smartphones, software-defined vehicles, XR devices, IoT, and others.
The new Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System for 10/3.5Gbps speed
The new Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF system is a complete modem-to-antenna platform, which now integrates AI features that will improve data speeds, latency, quality of service (QoS), coverage, location accuracy, spectrum efficiency, power efficiency, and multi-antenna management.
Specification-wise, the Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF system includes a new 5G AI Processor Gen 2 with dedicated tensor hardware accelerator Qualcomm 5G AI Suite Gen 3, and handles AI-enhanced performance improvements in power handling, coverage, latency, and QoS, AI-assisted mmWave beam management – mmWave (SA) range extension for CPE, and AI-based GNSS Location Gen 3. The Advanced Modem-RF Software suite comes with Smart Network Selection Gen 3, Non-Linear Interference Cancellation, and various dual and uplink features. It also gets Qualcomm's own RF Uplink Optimization and RF Downlink Boost, Qualcomm WTM565 mmWave module, and Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 5.
The cellular modem itself offers peak download of up to 10Gbps and peak upload of 3.5Gbps, with 10CC and 5CC aggregation in mmWave and 5G sub-6GHz, respectively. It supports all global 5G bands, from 0.6 to 41GHz, and comes with an extensive list of performance enhancement technologies, including the previously mentioned ones and the 5G Ultra-Low Latency Suite, Smart Transmit Gen 4 technology, and Snapdragon Satellite.
According to Qualcomm, the first commercial devices powered by Snapdragon X80 are expected to launch in the second half of 2024.
Qualcomm FastConnect 7900 brings the first AI-optimized Wi-Fi 7 system
In addition to the new Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF system, Qualcomm also unveiled the new FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity system, integrating AI-optimized Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth, and Ultra Wideband technologies in a single chip.
According to specifications offered by Qualcomm, the FastConnect 7900 integrates with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and UWB, as well as audio with support for Snapdragon Sound and Qualcomm XPAN. In addition, it brings 40% lower power usage compared to the previous generation, which is an impressive feat.
The Wi-Fi side supports up to 5.8 Gbps data rate using 4K QAM modulation and 320MHz channel bandwidth (single channel or 160 + 160 with High Band Simultaneous) and up to 4.3 Gbps with 4K QAM and 240MHz combined channel bandwidth using multiple streams of globally available 5GHz spectrum. It also comes with all the security and encryption, support for all current standards, and various features.
In addition to Bluetooth 5.4, it has integrated audio with Qualcomm aptX audio, Snapdragon Sound, Low latency Gaming mode with Voice back-channel, LE Audio, and Spatial Audio. The UWB part supports IEEE 802.15.4z, Fine Ranging (FiRa), Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) standards, with single transmit and three receive chains, and features like Time of Flight (ToF) and Angle of Arrival (AoA).
You can check out more details over at Qualcomm's website.
