Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 mobile processor for smartphones at the Qualcomm Tech Summit in Hawaii late on Tuesday, adding substantially more performance and AI-powered features to 2022 smartphones. However, one of those may be controversial. While you may be used to your phone always listening for commands, are you ready for its camera to be always on, too? In an interesting twist, Snapdragon 8 phones will even be able to mint NFTs. Now the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is poised to help launch even more, beginning in the fourth quarter of this year.

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.

When's the last time you chirped, "Hey Google" (or Siri for that matter), and asked your phone for a recommendation for good sushi in the area, or perhaps asked what time sunset would be? Most folks these days perform these tasks on a regular basis on their phones, but you may not have realized there were multiple AI (Artificial Intelligence) engines involved in quickly delivering the results for your request. In these examples, AI neural network models were used to process natural language recognition, and then also inferred what you were looking for, to deliver relevant search results from internet databases around the globe, but also targeting the most appropriate results based on your location and a number of other factors as well. These are just a couple of examples but, in short, AI or machine learning processing is a big requirement of smartphone experiences these days, from recommendation engines to translation, computational photography and more. As such, benchmarking tools are now becoming more prevalent, in an effort to measure mobile platform performance. MLPerf is one such tool that nicely covers the gamut of AI workloads, and today Qualcomm is highlighting some fairly impressive results in a recent major update to the MLCommons database.

One of the most widely used terms around technology in recent years is Artificial Intelligence or AI. The word AI gets thrown around every now and then especially at smartphone launches and other tech events. This is mainly because AI has made its way into our lives in more than just one way. Right from clicking a good picture on your phone to suppressing background noise while you're in an online meeting, AI plays a major role in improving the end-user experience. To understand more about AI and its influence on mobile technology, XDA's sister site Pocketnow had a detailed conversation with Qualcomm.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the verge to unleash its potential impact in the smartphone industry. Isn't it amazing to find how smartphones when integrated with AI have the capability of making their own choices as per the environment? Smartphones have become smarter than ever before, and with AI on the rise, the features could be limitless. However, with AI integration, your smartphone will only get better. From offering better protection to providing lower latency and efficiency improvement, your phone can make its choice without having the need to configure them.

The unveiling of Qualcomm's new flagship chip -- the Snapdragon 888 -- this week for Android smartphones underlines just how big a role artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will play in upcoming smartphones. Like how the recent iPhone 12 launch unpacked the tiny transistors and the AI advantages of Apple's new A14 Bionic chip – promising nearly 30% uptick in CPU, GPU, and AI-powered sensors performances – the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 is the chipmaker's first 5-nanometer chip. The smaller transistors on these 5nm chips mean that performance gains are boosted up to 35% higher than previous generations, and the 888 also has its 5G modem built into it rather than a separate component in previous chips – which means that connectivity is also being enhanced alongside the processing and graphical capabilities. The combination of 5G coverage and AI-powered sensor input should be no slouch for the next-generation of topline Android devices, but AI will not just be enhancing the camera and other sensors. "Qualcomm's addition of a large AI accelerator and TinyML to its next-generation 5G mobile platform is a game-changer for 5G mobile devices," said Lian Jye Su, the principal analyst at tech market advisory firm, ABI Research.

Qualcomm just announced its latest premium mobile processor, the Snapdragon 888. This 5 nm chip, rumored to be made at a Samsung facility, provides multiple levels of improvement in central processing power, high end graphics that approach the capabilities of a gaming console. There are also camera improvements that threaten stand-alone DSLR, and AI functions that enhance and protect camera still and video images from "Deep Fakes" while also providing big improvements in AI inference workloads. And, of course, it runs on 5G networks, along with supporting faster Wi-Fi 6 and 6E capability. One feature that stands out for me seems to be buried in most coverage of the 888 processor and has the potential for dramatically changing the way mobile devices work, as well as enhancing security well beyond where we are today.

Although Apple's latest A14 Bionic chip enabled the iPhone 12 family and iPad Air tablets to deliver impressive performance improvements, Qualcomm is making clear that the next generation of Android devices will rely heavily on advanced AI and computer vision processors to retake the performance lead. Teased yesterday at Qualcomm's virtual Tech Summit, the Snapdragon 888 is getting a full reveal today, and the year-over-year gains are impressive, notably including the largest jump in AI performance in Snapdragon history. The Snapdragon 888's debut is significant for technical decision makers because the chip will power most if not all of 2021's flagship Android phones, which collectively represent a large share of the over two billion computers sold globally each year. Moreover, the 888's increasing reliance on AI processing demonstrates how machine learning's role is now critical in advancing all areas of computing, ranging from how devices work when they're fully on to what they're quietly doing when not in active use. From a high-level perspective, the Snapdragon 888 is a sequel to last year's flagship 865 chips, leveraging 5-nanometer process technology and tighter integration with 5G and AI chips to deliver performance and power efficiency gains.