At Mobile World Congress 2024, Qualcomm announced new connectivity offerings with the FastConnect 7900 and Snapdragon X80 5G, as well as the Qualcomm AI Hub.
The FastConnect 7900 integrates Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Ultra Wideband (UWB). It’s built on a 6nm process node compared to 14nm for the 7800, with 40% lower power usage.
Having UWB, Wi-Fi Ranging, and Bluetooth Channel Sounding in one chip is said to “create a powerful suite of proximity technologies that enable security rich device discovery, access, and control” for digital (car) keys, object finding, and indoor navigation use cases. Meanwhile, AI is used to optimize power consumption, network latency, and throughput.
The FastConnect 7900 will launch commercially in the second half of 2024.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm’s latest modem is the Snapdragon X80 5G. It supports 6x carrier aggregation for sub-6GHz bands with peak 5G download speeds of 10 Gbps and 3.5 Gbps upload. There’s also “fully integrated” NB-NTN satellite communications support.
The Snapdragon X80 supports 3GPP Release 17 and Release 18, while Qualcomm touts software updatability to support 5G Advanced when that becomes available.
It once again features an AI processor (tensor accelerator) to “improve data speeds, latency, quality of service (QoS), coverage, location accuracy, spectrum efficiency, power efficiency and multi-antenna management.” The first devices with Snapdragon X80 will also launch in the second half of 2024.
The chipmaker’s other announcement at MWC is the Qualcomm AI Hub. This library lets developers access and integrate pre-optimized AI models for Snapdragon-powered devices. They are also available on GitHub and Hugging Face.
This library provides developers with more than 75 popular AI and generative AI models, such as Whisper, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Baichuan 7B, which are optimized for superior on-device AI performance, lower memory utilization, and better power efficiency, across different form factors and packaged in various runtimes.
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