Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon XElite Platform with Focus on AI

TapTechNews June 23rd, at this year's Computex conference earlier, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon XElite platform. At the launch event, the company almost only emphasized the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of this series of chips, with very few mentions of CPUs and GPUs. However, to utilize the powerful performance of Qualcomm's Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), there needs to be AI software that can match it.

The good news is that Qualcomm has now developed, optimized and verified AI models for its 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU. Registered developers can go to Qualcomm's AIHub to obtain these pre-trained models and quickly build AI applications.

Qualcomm officially stated: Qualcomm AIHub now provides computing models for everyone. Register immediately and you can run, download and deploy optimized AI models on the Snapdragon XElite platform.

TapTechNews noticed that Qualcomm AIHub provides various AI models optimized for edge devices of the Snapdragon XElite processor, covering areas such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and generative AI, etc. In addition, AIHub also provides convenient tools and documentation to help developers easily deploy AI models in applications such as vision, audio and speech.

In order to further simplify the development process, developers can filter models according to labels such as trunk, base, quantization and real-time. The Developer Center also provides detailed examples and code snippets to guide developers in deploying and running AI models on devices of the Snapdragon XElite processor series.

By providing pre-trained models optimized for the 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU, Qualcomm hopes to see a large number of applications that can utilize the powerful AI capabilities of the Snapdragon XElite platform emerging in the next year, thereby stimulating the market demand for Qualcomm SoCs.

In fact, the reason why Qualcomm emphasized the AI capabilities so much rather than high-end CPUs and GPUs at the Snapdragon XElite launch event is partly to attract the attention of software developers. Qualcomm believes that AI will be the killer feature for PCs in 2024.

Moreover, by providing models optimized for specific hardware, Qualcomm also ensures that AI programs can obtain the best performance on the Snapdragon XElite platform, which will give it an advantage over its competitors AMD and Intel, who will soon introduce AI processors with high-performance NPUs.