Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on more than 40 different wearable artificial intelligence devices — including jewelry, camera headsets, pins and watches — a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next big computing platform won’t be a phone.
To further this vision, Qualcomm is announcing two new offerings: a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed reality glasses, designed to run more powerful AI on the device, 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 the previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite offers 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 specifications can be hard to put into context, but Qualcomm offers one specific data point, saying the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for fast, responsive AI interactions. Qualcomm says the chip will also enable better head and hand tracking, along with improved transparency capabilities.
The Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K resolution per eye at 90 fps, a modest bump from the 4.3K resolution per eye of the XR2+ Gen 2. (The higher the resolution per eye and frame rate, the sharper and smoother the visual experience, which is more important in reducing the nausea and eye strain that have historically made extended headset use uncomfortable.)
Qualcomm says the platform is designed to power two types of devices: standalone optical projection headsets (VSTs), which overlay digital content over a real-world camera feed, and lightweight, tethered optical projection glasses (OSTs), which combine digital images directly into your field of vision. Among the first devices to use it: the XREAL Project Aura, shown at Google I/O earlier this year, and an upcoming device from Play for Dream.
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 offers three reference designs: an audio + camera setup similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, a monocular display, and diopters.
Eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and O’Neill — owned by TitanFlex — 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.
Amon’s comments, it was on CNBCembody the strategic rationale behind the two announcements. He argued that as companies seek to collect more real-world data from users to feed their AI agents, a new wave of hardware startups will emerge creating new form factors, with major implications for established smartphone players like Apple and Samsung.
“I think there will be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” Amon said. “Right now, we have over 40 designs of these devices and I’m telling you the types of form factors are very, very broad.” He added, “Principle is something you wear, something [that] it’s with you all the time, which can see the world around you, so you have the context and the ability to access an agent and talk to the agent.”
To that end, Qualcomm is explicitly positioning itself as the foundational silicon layer for everything that comes after the smartphone. START’s white label program, in particular, is designed to lower the barrier for new entrants.
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