Qualcomm has demonstrated the AI image generation capabilities built into its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor.
Qualcomm published on its blog the first results of an experiment demonstrating the how Stable Diffusion works on an Android smartphone. This Artificial Intelligence, or rather this machine learning model, makes it possible to generate more or less realistic images in a few seconds from a textual description. The company’s engineers used a smartphone running Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to generate images of… cats.
The desired image description was of a “super cute fluffy warrior cat in armor, photorealistic, 4K, ultra detailed, V-Ray render, unreal engine”. In this case again, artificial intelligence is more efficient than that of human beings. It took just 14.42s to create a 512 x 512 pixel artwork. The same operation on a computer takes only slightly less time. Qualcomm teams say, “With over a billion parameters, Stable Diffusion has until now been confined to running in the cloud.”
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 allows to generate images on an Android smartphone thanks to AI
All the vital forces of Qualcomm have been put to use, because it was not only necessary to create an Android application, but also optimize the artificial neural network model, the algorithms, and all the hardware part. The company has thus managed to bring the desktop version of Stable Diffusion, which requires 10 GB of storage and 6 GB of VRAM, to smartphones thanks to quantization. Qualcomm even claims that this process “increases performance while saving energy”. It thus allows the model to run on dedicated SoC components while consuming less RAM.
Eventually, according to Qualcomm, AI image generation will be possible without an internet connection. This technological breakthrough is great news for smartphone users. It is above all a great publicity stunt for Qualcomm. It’s unclear when the image generation will be made available to the public, but smartphone makers should already be looking at the company’s future processors such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Source : Qualcomm
