As Qualcomm continues to round-out its mobile processor offerings, the company recently announced its latest addition to its midrange chip lineup, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2. The new processor is designed to give mobile devices decent performance without going overboard on price.

As for what users can expect, the new Snapdragon new chip comes with support for Quick Charge 4+ technology for fast-charging capabilities, and is designed to work alongside Qualcomm's Kryo CPU and Adreno GPU for day-to-day tasks and gaming. Speaking of the latter, the new chip also supports FHD+ displays as well as 144Hz refresh rates, in addition to select Snapdragon Elite Gaming Features such as Qualcomm Game Color Plus and Qualcomm Game Quick Touch.

For imaging, the 7s Gen 2 also features Qualcomm's Spectr 12-bit ISP for detailed photography, as well as support for 4K HDR video capture, and improved low-light photography performance. As with the rest of Qualcomm's newer chips, the 7s Gen 2 also features built-in AI processing for improved performance, as well as facial recognition and QR-code scanning by way of the Qualcomm Sensing Hub.

Other details include support for up to 2.9 Gbps connection speeds with mmWave and sub-6GHz support, and Qualcomm FastConnect 6700 Mobile Connectivity System with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity.

Sanjiv Taneja, one of three men indicted last year after ripping off chipmaker Qualcomm for more than $150 million, pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering involving a $1.5 million transaction related to the funds that Taneja and the other defendants conned out of Qualcomm. The San Diego-based company was tricked into buying technology that already belonged to the company according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. The other two indicted were Karim Arabi and Ali Akbar Shokouhi.

Arabi, while working for Qualcomm as the company's vice president of research and development, invented a way to evaluate micro-processors during the "design for test" phase that was faster than other methods. Under his employment contract, any intellectual property created by him while working for Qualcomm belonged to the company.

But Taneja admitted in the plea agreement that he and his co-defendants decided they wanted to personally profit from the invention instead of turning it over to Qualcomm. So they came up with a plan to hide Arabi's involvement in a startup company that said it owned the technology that technically belonged to the chipmaker.

Arabi was still a Qualcomm employee when the company was negotiating with the startup and was still there when Qualcomm agreed to buy it. Qualcomm wanted the startup so that it could acquire the technology that Arabi had created at Qualcomm; in other words, the chipmaker was buying its own technology. Qualcomm was told that the startup was funded by angel investors. these are wealthy individuals who help fund a small company in exchange for equity in the firm. Qualcomm agreed to pay $180 million for the start-up with $150 million paid in cash upfront.

Qualcomm didn't know that its own employee had created the technology it bought because it was told that a Canadian graduate student working for the startup had invented it. The student was "played" by Arabi's younger sister and she was listed as the inventor on provisional patents even though her brother filed the patent applications using fake email accounts to hide his identity.

Acting U.S. Attorney Andrew R. Haden said, "Fraud and deceit undermine legitimate businesses and the marketplace, whether they victimize small businesses or multinational corporations and their shareholders. This office will seek justice against wrongdoers, big and small alike."

Qualcomm is a fabless chipmaker which means that while it designs its own chips, it doesn't own the facilities to manufacture them. Thus, the company relies on contract foundries like TSMC and Samsung Foundry and has used both of those companies to manufacture its Snapdragon line of application processors. Currently, TSMC builds Qualcomm's current flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

If there is one reason why digital assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Bixby, and Cortana did not take off in a huge way despite its huge potential, it would be the fact that they are pretty slow.

This is because in order to process the requests users were making, it had to be sent to a remote server, meaning users had to wait for the request to go through and for it to be executed. Plus there are other concerns like privacy and security, but Qualcomm and Meta are hoping to address that with 2024's phones.

Both companies have announced that they will be working together to bring on-device AI to phones starting in 2024. This means that the AI will work within the device itself, increasing its speed and also ensuring greater privacy. The AI being used in question will be Llama 2, an open source large language model. According to Qualcomm:

"This will allow customers, partners, and developers to build use cases, such as intelligent virtual assistants, productivity applications, content creation tools, entertainment, and more. These new on-device AI experiences, powered by Snapdragon, can work in areas with no connectivity or even in airplane mode."

That being said, it is still a bit early to tell how this will work out and what kind of features end users can look forward to. We imagine that Meta's own products and services could take advantage of the on-device AI, but nothing has been confirmed yet.

Meta has also confirmed that Microsoft their preferred partner for Llama 2, where it will be supported on Microsoft's Azure and Windows platforms.

Before, while utilizing Bluetooth headsets or speakers, you could understand that there is somewhat of a slack where the sound and anything it is you are watching doesn't appear to match up. This inertness issue is one reason why numerous audiophiles still favor utilizing wired associations with their earphones or speakers.

Nowadays, it has become less of an issue, however it doesn't imply that it is gone totally. Qualcomm needs to address these sound dormancy issues and have since declared another chip as the S3 Gen 2 Snapdragon Sound, which they have introduced as an idea USB dongle.

Fundamentally, this dongle is an across the board sort of arrangement that consolidates the most recent in Bluetooth innovation, like LE Sound, and Auracast, which as per Qualcomm will bring about dormancy of under 20ms which ought to be imperceivable to the vast majority. The thought is that by bundling it in a USB dongle design, clients will actually want to interface it to different sound sources including their PCs, televisions, phones, control center, or even their vehicles.

So on the off chance that you utilize remote sound with any of these gadgets, connecting this dongle ought to bring about an extensive drop in dormancy. Qualcomm additionally appears to imagine their innovation being bundled inside the charging instance of genuine remote headphones, implying that clients won't have to haul around an additional accomplice to benefit from their sound.

Qualcomm as of late affirmed that they will have their Snapdragon Highest point in October in the not so distant future. This is probably where the organization will report their cutting edge chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Presently as indicated by spilled benchmarks kindness of Weibo client NonxCirno, it seems to be the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be a presentation monster. The AnTuTu benchmark scores shared uncovered that the chipset figured out how to get a score of 1,771,106. For setting, the main three gadgets on AnTuTu's benchmarks scored 1,358,352, 1,324,440, and 1,307,816 individually.

This would propose that the Gen 3 chipset will be outperforming its ancestor and rivals in the exhibition office. We guess we ought not be amazed. On the off chance that there weren't any important redesigns it wouldn't be extremely captivating, and yet, it was recently supposed that Qualcomm could be utilizing a 10MB L3 reserve alongside the Adreno 750 GPU, so these updates are somewhat normal.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is supposed to be utilized in most of leader phones in 2024, however it has likewise been reputed that Xiaomi could get the best of everybody and use it in the Xiaomi 14 that will send off before the current year's over.