On the first day of the ongoing annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced the next generation of mobile platforms. On the second day, the company detailed about the performance of those chipsets and now, the US-based chipmaker has revealed Snapdragon Compute portfolio. The new platforms are claimed to bring long battery life and accelerated AI performance. It also unveiled the Snapdragon XR2 -- world’s first 5G-supported extended reality (XR) platform. Here are the details.
Qualcomm has launched Snapdragon 7c and 8c Compute platforms that are claimed to deliver long battery life, cellular connectivity, and AI accelerated performance to enable fanless, thin and light designs for modern computing. The new platforms, which now join the Snapdragon 8cx platform, are available at various price points. ‘The mobile-first consumer wants an experience on par with a smartphone, and we have the innovation, the inventions and the technology to enable this experience for customers across price points,’ Alex Katouzian, Senior Vice President And General Manager, Mobile, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc, said.
The Snapdragon 7c is for entry level devices. Qualcomm says that the latest platform delivers a 25 per cent boost in system performance and up to twice the battery life when compared with competing platforms plus lightning- fast connectivity via the Snapdragon X15 LTE modem. It has an octa-core Qualcomm Kryo 468 CPU, Qualcomm Adreno 618 GPU, and Qualcomm AI Engine that delivers over five trillion operations per second (TOPS) of performance for the latest AI accelerated experiences offered by Windows 10.
The 7nm Snapdragon 8c is said to boost performance up to 30 per cent over the Snapdragon 850. It has an integrated Snapdragon X24 LTE modem that enables multi-gigabit connectivity speeds for cloud computing. Its Qualcomm AI Engine dedicates six TOPS to accelerate machine learning applications.
As mentioned, the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Platform is the world’s first 5G-supported extended reality (XR) platform. The chipmaker says that this platform offers features multiple firsts that can be scaled across augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR).
The Snapdragon XR2 Platform is claimed to deliver 2x the CPU and GPU performance, 4x more video bandwidth, 6x higher resolution and 11x AI improvement over its predecessor. The Snapdragon XR2 Platform is the world’s first XR platform to support seven concurrent cameras and a dedicated computer vision processor. ‘Additionally, this is the first XR platform to enable low latency camera pass-through to unlock true MR, which allow users to see, interact and create a hybrid of the virtual and real world while wearing a VR device,’ the company said.
Visuals: The Snapdragon XR2 Platform supports 1.5x the pixel rate and 3x the texel rate for efficient, high graphics rendering when compared with its predecessor. Its panel offers up to 3K by 3K resolution per eye at 90 frames per second (fps) and is the first XR platform to support 8K 360 degree videos at 60 fps.
Interactivity: As mentioned, the Snapdragon XR2 comes with a support for seven concurrent cameras and a custom computer vision processor. Multiple concurrent cameras enable real-time and highly accurate tracking of the head, lips and eyes together with 26-point skeletal hand tracking.
Audio: The platform offers next-gen audio layers in a rich, 3D spatial sound while providing crystal-clear voice interactions to deepen immersion. The platform has a custom built always-on, low power Qualcomm Hexagon DSP to support hardware accelerated features like voice activation and context detection.
AI and 5G: Qualcomm says that it has improved multiple Snapdragon XR2 features using AI, including visuals, interactivity and audio. 5G support enables boundless XR using split processing between a device and edge cloud.
