Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on over 40 different AI wearable devices \u2014 including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches \u2014 a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next major computing platform won\u2019t be a phone.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K per-eye resolution at 90 fps, a modest bump from the XR2+ Gen 2\u2019s 4.3K per-eye resolution. (The higher the per-eye resolution and frame rate, the sharper and smoother the visual experience, which matters most for reducing the motion sickness and eye strain that\u2019ve historically made extended headset use uncomfortable.)<\/p>\n
Qualcomm says the platform is designed to power two types of devices: stand-alone video-see-through (VST) headsets, which layer digital content over a camera feed of the real world, and lightweight, tethered optical-see-through (OST) glasses, which blend digital imagery directly into your field of view. 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.<\/p>\n
START, meanwhile, consists of an AR chip, a software platform, companion apps, and a white-label program aimed at helping hardware makers get to market faster. Through the white label program, the company is offering three reference designs: an audio + camera setup similar to Meta\u2019s Ray-Ban smart glasses, a monocular display, and a binocular display.<\/p>\n
Eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and O\u2019Neill \u2014 owned by TitanFlex \u2014 will be among the first partners in the white label program. Qualcomm said START will expand beyond smart glasses to support other form factors in the future.<\/p>\n
Amon\u2019s comments, made to CNBC, flesh out the strategic logic behind both announcements. He argued that as companies seek to gather more real-world data from users to power their AI agents, a new wave of hardware startups building novel form factors will emerge, with major implications for established smartphone players like Apple and Samsung.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s going to be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,\u201d Amon said. \u201cRight now, we have over 40 designs of those devices, and I\u2019m telling you, the types of form factors are very, very broad.\u201d He added, \u201cThe principle is something that you wear, something [that] is with you all the time, something that can see the world around you, so you have context and have the ability for you to access an agent and talk to the agent.\u201d<\/p>\n
To that end, Qualcomm is explicitly positioning itself as the foundational silicon layer for whatever comes after the smartphone. START\u2019s white-label program, in particular, is designed to lower the barrier for new entrants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/qualcomm-layoff-san-diego.jpg?resize=1200,800″] Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on over 40 different AI wearable devices \u2014 including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches \u2014 a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next major computing platform won\u2019t be a phone. To power that vision, Qualcomm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,62],"class_list":["post-1994367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-techcrunch-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1994367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1994367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1994367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1994367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}