May 1, 2026
22 min read
Mobile AI • NPU • On-Device Inference
Running Transformer Models on Mobile NPUs: What Actually Works (and What Breaks)
Field-tested engineering report from deploying RoBERTa-base (125M params) on Snapdragon 8 Elite's Hexagon NPU. 8 backends tested, real failure cases with Issue/Effect/Fix analysis, w8a16 quantization breakthrough, and the design decisions behind SentiLog's production AI stack.
Snapdragon 8 Elite
Hexagon NPU
ONNX Runtime
LiteRT
w8a16 Quantization
Qualcomm AI Hub
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