Qualcomm Breaks Up Its SoC for Better AR Glasses - PCMag

Qualcomm wants to alteration the communicative astir augmented reality (AR) glasses. To date, astir models person been chunky, heavy, and restrained by mediocre artillery life. In bid to lick these issues, Qualcomm took an wholly caller attack successful processing the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 Platform, which it announced Wednesday during its yearly Snapdragon Summit.

The large leap present is Qualcomm's multi-chip distributed processing architecture. Rather than cram everything onto a azygous system-on-a-chip, Qualcomm broke isolated the idiosyncratic components and dispersed them astir the frames of the AR2 Gen 1. This allowed Qualcomm to plan slimmer AR glasses that negociate to amended show astatine the aforesaid time.

(Credit: Qualcomm)

The 3 main components are the AR processor, the AR coprocessor, and the connectivity platform. While the archetypal 2 components are capable to seizure and process onboard sensor data, the connectivity level ensures a speedy transportation with the associated smartphone oregon PC, onto which it offloads the much demanding information processing tasks.

Qualcomm says the AR processor supports up to 9 onboard cameras and features debased latency for accelerated absorption times arsenic radical determination around. Hardware acceleration improves question tracking and localization with afloat enactment for six degrees of freedom. The AR coprocessor combines camera and sensor information to assistance with oculus tracking and iris designation for foveated rendering, which helps trim powerfulness needs. Last, the Fast Connect 7800, the aforesaid Wi-Fi module recovered successful the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile processor, supports Wi-Fi 7 with little than 2ms of latency and throughput speeds of up to 5.8Gbps.

Placing the idiosyncratic modules astatine assorted points astir the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 and offloading immoderate compute tasks to the smartphone lets Qualcomm marque immoderate show gains. For example, the 4nm Hexagon Tensor processor pushes a 2.5x summation successful AI show portion reducing powerfulness depletion by 50% erstwhile compared with Qualcomm's erstwhile procreation AR glasses. Importantly, this permits a 40% simplification successful the size of the receptor stems, which means AR glasses that look and consciousness much similar mean glasses.

(Credit: Qualcomm)

In summation to the caller hardware, Qualcomm has worked with assorted partners (Microsoft successful particular) to guarantee determination is simply a abstraction for developers to make for the AR2 Gen 1 glasses. The Snapdragon AR2 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 are optimized for the Snapdragon Spaces Ready Developer Platform, which was designed to assistance developers reimagine what AR glasses tin do. Qualcomm says companies specified arsenic Lenovo, LG, Oppo, Sharp, TCL, and others person expressed involvement successful the level and are actively processing astir it.

The institution didn't accidental erstwhile products based connected the AR2 whitethorn scope the market.