It’s been a big year for Qualcomm. Alongside its massive launch into laptop chips through the Snapdragon X Elite series, Qualcomm is now entering the automotive space. The company has announced the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite platforms at its annual Snapdragon Summit, which it flew me out to attend.
The two platforms are designed for different purposes, and can be used togetheror separately. The Snapdragon Cockpit Elite is built for in-vehicle infotainment systems and services, while the Snapdragon Ride Elite is built to power autonomous vehicle systems, including all the cameras and sensors that go into those systems.
At the heart of both platforms is the Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which is the same CPU that’s built into Snapdragon-powered smartphones. The result? Vehicles with software running on the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite could theoretically run as quick as your phone — that would be a huge improvement for most vehicles. That’s more important than ever as carmakers start to move toward building software-defined vehicles, or SDVs, in an attempt to be more like Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid.
Software support is important here. In the smartphone space, most Snapdragon chips run Android. In the PC space, they run Windows. But in the automotive world, there are dozens of in-car operating systems, each a little different. Qualcomm says that the platform will support all of these operating systems, though we’ll have to wait and see if it results in a performance hit.
It’ll support future vehicles with more displays too. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite can drive up to 16 displays with a 4K resolution, which is pretty huge.
AI support is important here too, especially when it comes to the Snapdragon Ride Elite, which is designed to process self-driving tech. Both platforms are designed with a dedicated neural processing unit, with the Snapdragon Ride Elite built specifically for low-latency and highly accurate processing. Low latency is important — the platforms support over 40 multimodal sensors, which includes up to 20 cameras to ensure 360-degree coverage, plus in-cabin monitoring.
And the platforms are designed to do all of this efficiently. That’s important too — the less power being used for processing, the more that can go into ensuring a decent range.
Car software is notoriously slow, often taking seconds to respond to touch and load menus. That’s not only annoying — it’s dangerous, representing more time that you spend looking at a screen when you should be looking at the road. As we head into a world of more and more autonomous tech, better processing is increasingly important.
Qualcomm says Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite will be “available for sampling” in 2025. That doesn’t mean we’ll see cars with the platforms in 2025 — it means automakers will be able to get the chips to start testing with. It could be some time before we can actually buy a car with one of these platforms, though, hopefully, they’ll be available sooner rather than later.
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