Qualcomm's new flagship chip can run a 30-billion-parameter AI model on a phone

Qualcomm unveiled two new flagship smartphone processors this week, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and a higher-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, built around running larger AI models directly on a phone. At its annual Snapdragon Summit, the company said the Extreme version can run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, an AI design that activates only some parameters at once, without connecting to the cloud.

That matters because mixture-of-experts models split their knowledge into smaller sections and call up only the sections relevant to a given request, so a 30-billion-parameter model can run faster and use less battery than one that processes all its parameters every time. Qualcomm says a new accelerator element on the Elite Gen 6 chip handles this workload more efficiently than earlier chips. For comparison, Apple’s most advanced on-device foundation model, introduced at its developer conference in June, uses 20 billion parameters in a similar mixture-of-experts design.

Both new chips also include a separate, low-power sensing hub that can run smaller models of up to 200 million parameters. Qualcomm says this hub lets a phone run a personal scribe that transcribes speech and tells different speakers apart, and can build a memory of how someone uses their device to suggest tasks worth automating. The company says the hub can also run a complete voice-in, voice-out AI agent on its own, without sending audio elsewhere for processing.

Camera and call quality

The chips add pixel-level control for camera software, along with improved stabilization and motion tracking, which Qualcomm says brings more professional-style controls to phone cameras. The Extreme version supports video recording at 8K resolution and 60 frames per second, plus 4K at 240 frames per second for slow-motion footage, and adds support for a new format called Advanced Professional Video. Both chips use AI to boost vocals and reduce background noise, and include a feature Qualcomm calls voice bubble, which isolates a caller’s voice from surrounding noise during phone calls.

Motorola announced the first phone built on the new hardware at the event: the Motorola Signature 27, powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, with general availability planned sometime this year, according to Motorola. Qualcomm said it is working with partners on more than 40 AI-focused devices in total. The push reflects a wider bet across the industry that phones, rather than separate AI hardware, will remain the main device people use for AI assistants, a view that Nothing co-founder Carl Pei and Apple executive John Ternus have both expressed in recent months.

What remains unclear is how the 30-billion-parameter model performs in daily use, since Qualcomm has not published independent benchmarks comparing it with cloud-based assistants. The next signal will be when phones built on these chips, starting with the Motorola Signature 27, reach retail and reviewers can test the on-device AI features against Qualcomm’s claims.