Qualcomm doubles down on automotive with new Snapdragon platforms

A car that thinks, plans ahead, entertains, saves time and provides a safe and comfortable ride depends on AI-enabled silicon. Can Qualcomm Snapdragon become a leader in this revolution? They already have.

The annual Snapdragon Summit (as usual, located in beautiful Maui, Hawaii) is Qualcomm’s communications event aimed at building Snapdragon into a consumer brand. This brand, which has historically been focused on premium smartphones, is expanding to include edge processing and especially to include and lead the explosion in the digital transformation of the automotive industry.

For the first time, Qualcomm dedicated an entire day at the Snapdragon Summit event in Maui to automotive and announced two new platforms, using the same new Oryon CPU announced on Day 1 as the Snapdragon 8 Elite for smartphones. These new automotive SoCs are Snapdragon Ride Elite and Snapdragon Cockpit Elite. The names say it all: Ride offers the ADAS computing engine up to level 3, while Cockpit offers the digital infotainment system that brings the automotive experience to a new level of functionality and comfort. And Elite shows both that these are high-end SoCs, offering adequate headroom to enable a 10-year life cycle,

Qualcomm has built a massive automotive ecosystem that no other SoC vendor can match. In terms of market reach, CEO Cristiano Amon recently said, “It would actually be harder for me to name a car dealer that we’re NOT involved with.” And this is a global statement. In fact, Qualcomm is extremely strong in China, which is now leading the industry in the autonomous direction. Qualcomm says 100 million cars on the road today use Snapdragon.

Most of the technology in the new Drive and Cockpit SoCs are the same or heavily leveraged from what’s found in the Snapdragon 8 Elite for mobile: Oryon CPU, Hexagon NPU for AI, Adreno GPU for graphics and AI, etc. is an example of Qualcomm’s overall strategy: developing best-in-class IP and integrating them into SoCs for specific markets and applications.

Qualcomm demonstrated several AI-led use cases that should resonate well with OEMs and end users, using voice-activated access to LLM, and then steering the vehicle around heavy traffic, emergencies, construction, etc. But the idea that your vehicle could essentially replace a smartphone for AI agents is particularly powerful.

Attractive thoughts

As we covered a few weeks ago, Qualcomm has become the undisputed leader in providing advanced semiconductor solutions for infotainment and ADAS to the automotive industry. The speed at which they have infused their product portfolio with new and mainstream technology, such as the Oryon cores, has been quite impressive, switching to a new CPU without losing a clock speed. Their first implementation of Oryon was for laptops, competing head-to-head with Intel and AMD, offering competitive performance, leading artificial intelligence and power efficiency.

That was a year ago. Now, Qualcomm is moving Oryon to the company’s flagship platform, Snapdragon for mobile, and we expect to see it migrate Oryon to lower-end handsets and, hopefully, to the Cloud AI platform for data center inference processing. data if the company still wants to be in that fast-growing space.

Disclosures: This article expresses the opinions of the author and should not be taken as advice to buy or invest in the companies mentioned. My firm, Cambrian-AI Research, is fortunate to have many semiconductor firms as our clients, including BrainChip, Cadence, Cerebras Systems, D-Matrix, Esperanto, Flex, Groq, IBM, Intel, Micron, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Graphcore , SimA .ai, Synopsys, Tenstorrent, Ventana Microsystems and many investors. I have no investment positions in any of the companies mentioned in this article. For more information, please visit our website at https://cambrian-AI.com.