Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside whatever replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products toward that end
Key takeaways
- Compared to its previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers improvements of up to 60% in GPU performance, up to 30% in CPU performance, and up to 160% in NPU performance, according to the company.
- The Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K per-eye resolution at 90 fps, a modest bump from the XR2+ Gen 2 s 4.3K per-eye resolution.
- Among the first devices to use it: XREAL Project Aura, shown at Google I/O earlier this year, and an upcoming device from Play for Dream.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on over 40 different AI wearable devices — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches — a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next major computing platform won t be a phone at all.
To power that vision, Qualcomm is announcing two new offerings: a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed reality glasses, designed to run more powerful on-device AI, and the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START), a combination of hardware modules and a software stack for AI devices, starting with smart glasses.
Compared to its previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers improvements of up to 60% in GPU performance, up to 30% in CPU performance, and up to 160% in NPU performance, according to the company. Percentage gains in chip specs can be hard to contextualize, but Qualcomm offers one concrete data point, saying the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for quick, responsive AI interactions. Qualcomm says the chip will also enable better head and hand tracking, along with improved see-through capabilities.