Qualcomm just unveiled the latest mobile chipset to join its armada, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. Obviously, this is a refresh of the mid-range Snapdragon 7 Gen 2 and brings some new features to the table. We've long known that Qualcomm chips were about to get on-device AI integration, and the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 is no exception. Nearly every aspect of this chip seems to have been designed with artificial intelligence in mind, with Qualcomm saying that the components "deliver across-the-board advancements to ignite on-device AI." This should significantly speed up generative AI applications, with advertised benchmarks of just one second to create Stable Diffusion images from a text prompt. Of course, a mobile CPU is more than just AI, despite what marketing wants you to believe, and the 7 Gen 3 seems powerful for a mid-range chipset.

At its annual Snapdragon Summit on Tuesday, Qualcomm revealed its latest mobile chipset. Perhaps the biggest change in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the introduction of on-device generative AI (akin to Google's Tensor G3). The chipset's AI Engine supports multi-modal generative AI models and what Qualcomm claims is the world's fastest Stable Diffusion system with the ability to generate an image in under a second. So, you should be able to whip up backgrounds and images for social media posts in a flash. Because GAI requests are handled on-device, Qualcomm says they remain private.

Every December for the last few years, Qualcomm has held an annual event in Hawaii to announce its latest flagship mobile chipset. This year was no different with the company taking the opportunity to unveil the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. That's right, for the second year in a row, Qualcomm is moving away from the sequential numbering scheme that has defined its processors for years. Just as the Snapdragon 865 gave way to the 888, the company will now replace the 888 with the Gen 1. The company says it's capable of theoretical download speeds of 10Gbps. That's one of those specs that's impressive on paper, but won't mean much out in the real world since some of the fastest 5G networks can't deliver speeds greater than 4Gbps in ideal conditions.

Huawei today unveiled in its Shenzhen headquarters a new AI chipset for IoT devices, in yet another move by the company to reduce its reliance on U.S. components. Named the Ascend 910, this chipset comes just two weeks after Huawei pulled back the curtain on its own proprietary operating system, HarmonyOS, which will be used in an upcoming smart TV and soon other smart home products from the company. Almost exactly two years ago Huawei introduced the Kirin 970, the first mobile chipset with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which brought on-device machine learning capabilities to the Mate 10 series of smartphones. Apple and Qualcomm didn't implement a neural engine into their respective mobile chipsets (the A series and Snapdragon series) until a year later. The Ascend 910's A.I. scale is much larger than the Kirin chips' NPU, as it's designed to handle large data networks and in the near future power smart cities and driver-less cars--in China, at least. It is very unlikely western countries will adopt Huawei's A.I. framework anytime soon, given all the recent allegations made by the U.S. government.

Huawei launched the latest mobile Kirin 970 chipset that has its own AI processor built-in. The announcement was made during the ongoing IFA tech show in Berlin. The Kirin 970 chip is powered by an octa-core CPU and the latest generation 12-core GPU. The Chinese smartphone company says the mobile chipset will be built using on a 10nm manufacturing process, similar to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and Samsung's Exynos 8895 chipsets. It will also support HDR 10, and 4K video recording at 60 frames per second (fps).

A big part of Huawei's multi-year push to improve its image has been improving the hardware it builds to go inside them, and its latest processor is more than up to the challenge. Unveiled today at IFA 2017, the Kirin 970 chipset goes beyond the initial machine learning implementation of previous designs and is ready to be an AI processing powerhouse. Earlier this year Huawei introduced "the intelligent phone" with its Mate 9 (pictured above), but the new hardware could help fix some annoying AI-related drawbacks of the device. While AI work done in the cloud is one thing, on-device AI computation will continue to grow, with the need for sensors to operate without waiting to send any information back and forth over wireless connections. Native AI processing will enable faster image and voice recognition, as well as "intelligent photography." A few people first spotted some specifications at the company's IFA booth, showing that it's sticking to last generation's octa-core setup with four 2.4Ghz Cortex-A73 processors and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 cores, but produced using an improved 10nm process instead of the old 12nm.

Samsung has delayed the launch of its new voice-activated personal assistant feature on its latest smartphone. Voice-powered assistant Bixby - which allows users to search and categorise photographs and information by using voice commands - was due to debut on the electronics giant's new Galaxy S8 smartphones as an answer to Apple's Siri. The South Korean company announced that the much anticipated Bixby feature was being dropped just days before the launch of the S8. Samsung's eagerly anticipated iPhone rival the Galaxy S8 (left) and Samsung Galaxy S8 (right) were launched at joint events in New York and London last month The global roll out of the phone will take place on 21 April. While Samsung did not give a reason for the delay, previous reports have suggested the software was lacking in the days ahead of its launch.

After months of leaks and countless rumours, the Samsung Galaxy S8 has been officially unveiled. The eagerly-awaited iPhone rival features a radical redesign to allow a massive 5.8-inch screen to be squeezed in to a device with a relatively small footprint. The device is one of two new phones with the S8 landing alongside the even larger 6.2-inch Samsung Galaxy S8 . Both feature facial recognition technology that allows users to unlock the phone with their face, and a Bixby'personal assistant' button. They are available for preorder on March 30th and will be shipping on April 21st.