Qualcomm unveils flagship phone chips with local 30-billion-parameter AI support

Qualcomm announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 processors for flagship smartphones. Both include sensing hubs that can run models with as many as 200 million parameters for functions such as speaker recognition and personal task memory. Qualcomm says the Extreme version can run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model locally by activating only part of the model for each task. Motorola plans to use the Extreme chip in its Signature 27 phone, with general availability sometime this year. Real-world speed, power use and model performance were not provided.