Qualcomm Demos Stable Diffusion On Android Phones For Ultra-Low Power AI Image Generation

AI has been a ubiquitous buzzword for years, and it's everywhere. Mobile SoCs and desktop processors alike have been including AI acceleration for a couple of generations already, but what can an individual do, locally on their own device, with AI? Until relatively recently, not much, at least directly. Within the last year, though, there have emerged some open-source projects that make working with AI locally a much more accessible proposition.

Well, you can't run it, exactly—at least, not yet, because the files simply aren't available. Still, Qualcomm published a brief video (below) and a blog post boasting about the achievement. The video demonstrates a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 powered device using a simple Stable Diffusion interface to generate a single 512x512-resolution image in 20 steps in just under 15 seconds, which is incredibly impressive. To put that in perspective, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor in the demonstration device draws less than ten watts of power. For comparison's sake, a GeForce RTX 2060 card can draw as much as 200 watts to do the same task in only about half the time. It's fair to mention that the GeForce card can do batches of a few images with little loss of performance, but again, we're talking about a device that draws twenty times as much power—and still needs the whole rest of a PC for support. In that context, Qualcomm's achievement here is nothing short of astonishing.
Ultimately, the result is represented in the demo video: real AI image generation without cloud acceleration, running directly on a low-power handset. And it can be done without an internet connection, in case that isn't clear. This is an impressive accomplishment, and absolutely worthy of note.