Qualcomm Unveils New Snapdragon Platforms for Agentic AI
- tech360.tv
- Sep 30
- 3 min read
Qualcomm announced two new flagship processors, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for smartphones and the Snapdragon X2 Elite for personal computers, at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii. These platforms aim to establish the silicon backbone for a new era of "agentic AI." The company’s vision centres on context-aware, multimodal, and proactive platforms, designed to anticipate user needs and react in real time.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is built on a 3-nanometre process, featuring the third-generation Oryon CPU architecture. Qualcomm claims a 20% CPU performance uplift and 35% better efficiency compared to its predecessor, with clock speeds reaching up to 4.6 GHz on its two prime cores. The new Adreno GPU architecture delivers a 23% graphics boost and 25% improved ray tracing, while the Hexagon NPU is 37% faster for on-device AI workloads.
This mobile platform is the first to support Advanced Professional Video (APV) recording, a new, royalty-free video compression standard developed by Samsung. APV is designed to provide professional-grade, near-lossless video capture on mobile devices. For gamers, the new GPU's memory optimisations, including its shared HPM cache, aim for higher frame rates and more efficient rendering, resulting in lower power consumption and longer gaming sessions.
Qualcomm states the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is engineered from the ground up for agentic AI. Demos showcased AI agents capable of processing what users see and hear, and anticipating user thoughts in real time. These agents proactively offer recommendations, summarise conversations, and adjust camera settings instantly, all while maintaining data on-device for privacy.
The Snapdragon Seamless Agent was positioned as a cross-device orchestrator, managing context and continuity across phones, personal computers, earbuds, and wearables. Qualcomm Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon outlined the company's vision in his keynote, referring to it as the "ecosystem of you."
On the personal computer side, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon X2 Elite, the successor to last year’s Snapdragon X Elite platform. Built on an enhanced Oryon CPU architecture, the X2 Elite is designed to deliver desktop-class performance with laptop-class efficiency. Early benchmark numbers from prototype reference laptops showed multi-threaded throughput surpassing platforms from Intel, AMD, and single-threaded performance ahead of Apple’s M4.
In terms of graphics, Qualcomm presented 3DMark numbers, which were ahead of integrated graphics solutions from Intel Core Ultra 200 series Lunar Lake and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 series in 3DMark Solar Bay. These are early, Qualcomm-provided figures.
Qualcomm's vision extends to hybrid, agentic AI, enabling models to run seamlessly across local hardware and the cloud. This approach means AI agents can handle lightweight tasks instantly on-device, while utilising larger cloud models for more complex reasoning. This hybrid method reduces latency, optimises power consumption, and enhances privacy.
Qualcomm positions its chips as the connective tissue across smartphones, personal computers, cars, wearables, and Internet of Things devices. Demos illustrated a personal computer that could summarise emails, generate Excel spreadsheet graphs in real time, and act as a research assistant by pulling context from local files and online sources. Local inference provides seamless and responsive experiences, a capability that cloud-only solutions cannot match.
The company's goal is for AI agents to evolve from passive assistants into active partners. These agents are multimodal, processing text, voice, images, and environmental context simultaneously. By continuously learning on-device, these agents will eventually adapt to individual users while keeping sensitive data private.
Snapdragon Summit 2025 highlighted Qualcomm’s extensive vision for the future of computing, driven by intelligent, personalised AI agents running on-device. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 redefines mobile performance with faster CPU, GPU, and NPU performance, alongside built-in capabilities for a new class of agentic AI.
The Snapdragon X2 Elite aims to bring hybrid AI to life, combining local inference with cloud models to deliver proactive, context-aware experiences and critical task automation. The first wave of Snapdragon X2 Elite series personal computers is expected to arrive in the first half of 2026.
Qualcomm unveiled Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for smartphones and Snapdragon X2 Elite for personal computers.
Both platforms are designed to power a new era of "agentic AI" with context-aware, multimodal, and proactive capabilities.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 boasts significant CPU, GPU, and NPU performance gains, and is the first to support Advanced Professional Video (APV) recording.
Source: FORBES
