Wai Lei, Hawaii - Lemi is a good boy. But despite its undeniable charm, Lemi suffers from the same shortcomings that plague other dogs, regardless of breed.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite, announced this week, has features that make Remi and other pets the best they can be.

While much of the focus surrounding mobile chipsets is on performance, power efficiency, and neural engines, there is more to the system-on-chip inside a cell phone than the CPU, GPU, and neural processor. Mobile chipsets include an image signal processor (or AI ISP in the case of the Snapdragon 8 Elite) that extends the smartphone's camera capabilities.

In the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm made a number of changes to the ISP, increasing pixel throughput by 35% and allowing it to capture 4.3 gigapixels per second The Hexagon neural processor can now connect directly to the ISP, so data is lost The Hexagon Neural Processor can now connect directly to the ISP, allowing for live image adjustments without losing data. According to Qualcomm, the ISP supports “infinite segmentation,” essentially allowing images to be separated into over 250 different layers, each of which can be optimized.

All of these improvements seem to play a role in the AI-based pet-capturing capabilities supported by the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Qualcomm came up with a pretty clever way to showcase these features at the Snapdragon Summit this week. The hotel conference room was full of Remi and other four-legged animals that melted the hardened hearts of seasoned tech reporters like this reporter, who attended the summit as a guest of Qualcomm.

The AI pet photography tool works in three different ways. If the camera is set to activate when the pet looks directly into the lens, it can take a quick series of shots and select the best shot. It can also be set to take a long continuous shot, and the AI will select the best shot based on the parameters you set.

Another AI-powered tool for pet photos is useful for action shots: the Snapdragon 8 Elite's ISP segmentation feature allows the photo processing to sharpen and highlight the pet's fur, so it jumps around, details are not lost in the blurring of action as the pet jumps, zooms, or frolics. In Qualcomm's demo room, Remi jumped to catch a tennis ball, resulting in a photo that highlighted the details in Remi's fur.

It is up to the handset makers who use Qualcomm's silicon to decide what features they want to include in the final version of their phones. However, given how much we love our pets, especially when it comes to taking pictures of them, we can't imagine a situation where a phone manufacturer using the Snapdragon 8 Elite in their handset would not want to include such an AI-based pet photography tool.