TL;DRQualcomm unveiled Snapdragon Reality Elite for MR headsets and START, a turnkey smart glasses toolkit. CEO says 40+ AI wearable designs are underway.
Qualcomm announced two products on Tuesday aimed at positioning the company as the silicon supplier for whatever computing device eventually displaces the smartphone. The first is Snapdragon Reality Elite, a mixed reality chip platform with substantially improved AI processing for headsets and tethered glasses. The second is START, a white-label toolkit that gives eyewear manufacturers a near-complete smart glasses design they can brand, customise, and ship without building the technology stack themselves.
The announcements came alongside comments from CEO Cristiano Amon, who told CNBC that Qualcomm is working on more than 40 different AI wearable devices spanning jewelry, camera-equipped earbuds, pins, and watches. “I think there’s going to be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” Amon said. He described the unifying principle as “something that you wear, something that is with you all the time, something that can see the world around you.”
Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers up to 60% higher GPU performance, 30% higher CPU performance, and 160% higher NPU performance compared to the previous XR2+ Gen 2 platform. The chip’s neural processing unit is rated at 48 TOPS, enough to run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second on-device, according to Qualcomm. The platform also runs up to 20% longer on battery and up to 12 degrees Celsius cooler under the same workloads.
