It's official: the Honor Magic7 series will be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite

2024-10-21

This Wednesday, Honor will unveil MagicOS 9.0, but we get a sneak peek – and a confirmation that the Honor Magic7 series will be powered by the just-announced Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset from Qualcomm.

The Magic7 and MagicOS 9.0 will bring the “first real-time NPU graphics rendering for mobile gaming” and the “industry’s first on-device AI agent for an open ecosystem”. Okay, but what does that mean?

The official description is a little vague, but it will use generative AI to reduce the load on the GPU (and with that, reduce temperature and power usage). This also promises better image quality. It’s not clear whether this upscales frames rendered at a lower resolution or generates new frames or both. That’s a detail for next week.

The AI agent is called the YOYO assistant, by the way. It will have a wide range of uses: trip planning, including booking tickets, calendar scheduling, notification management, transferring files between apps and more. And it will take care of nuisances like canceling unwanted subscriptions.

It’s more sophisticated than a big “cancel” button – you can ask the YOYO which apps have an active auto-renewal subscription. The system will then look through your apps and show a list and let you cancel the ones you no longer want. The AI agent even knows how you like your coffee and can take you straight to the order page of your local coffee shop.

Honor’s partnership with Qualcomm extends beyond smartphones too with something called the MagicRing. No, it’s not a smart ring. Instead, it’s a technology that works across different devices, apps and services.

Windows on ARM PCs powered by Snapdragon can, for example, generate detailed images from simple sketches using Cocreator. With MagicRing, you can access Cocreator from tablets like the Honor MagicPad 2, for example.

The Honor Magic7 series will be unveiled next week (Wednesday). For now, you can check out the first teaser video, which shows off the Moon-inspired colorway and the new quad-camera.

“With this collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, we are defining the AI-first ecosystem and revolutionizing user experiences for the AI era. We are thrilled to introduce the industry’s first AI agent for an open ecosystem, and bring on-device generative AI to gaming powered by NPU computing for the first time. Welcome to the era of Autopilot AI for mobile,” said Dr. Ray Guo, CMO of Honor.