Something to look forward to: After years of monotony and relative stasis in the PC industry, things are starting to change. And man, it's getting exciting again! Earlier this year, AMD launched the Ryzen 7040, the first PC SoC with a built-in NPU (Neural Processing Unit) – otherwise known as an AI accelerator. Then a few weeks ago, Intel debuted its Core Ultra chip featuring its own AI accelerator. Now Qualcomm is putting an exclamation point on the AI PC trend with the launch of its Snapdragon X Elite SoC for PCs.
Why it matters: Qualcomm's annual Snapdragon Summit is typically a celebration of all things smartphone. After all, it's the time and place where the company unveils its latest SoC design for the next generation of premium Android smartphones. True to form, the company did introduce Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which is expected to be the engine powering upcoming premium phones from Samsung, Motorola, and many other vendors including Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi.
What just happened? During Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit 2022 conference in Hawaii, the wireless specialist introduced its latest premium mobile platform that'll power the next generation of flagship Android smartphones. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform is built on 4nm process technology and is comprised of a Kryo CPU featuring one prime core clocked at up to 3.2 GHz, four performance cores running at up to 2.8 GHz and three efficiency cores that can hit speeds of up to 2.0 GHz.