Qualcomm Doubles Down On Automotive With New Snapdragon Platforms

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

The annual Snapdragon Summit (as usual, located in beautiful Maui, Hawaii) is Qualcomm’s communication event intended to build Snapdragon into a consumer brand. That brand, which historically has been focussed on premium smartphones, is being extended to include edge processing and especially to include and lead the explosion in digital transformation of the automotive industry.

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

Qualcomm has built a massive ecosystem for automotive that no other SoC vendor can match. In terms of market reach, CEO Cristiano Amon said recently, “Actually it would be harder for me to name an auto vendor we are NOT involved with.” And thats a global statement. In fact, Qualcomm is extremely strong in China, which is now leading the industry on autonomous driving. Qualcomm says that 100s of millions of cars on the road today use Snapdragon.

Much of the technology in the new Drive and Cockpit SoC’s are the same as, or highly leveraged from, that found in the new Snapdragon 8 Elite for mobile: Oryon CPU, Hexagon NPU for AI, Adreno GPU for graphics and AI, etc. This is an example of Qualcomm’s overall strategy: develop best in class IP, and integrate them into SoCs for specific markets and applications.

Qualcomm showed a few AI-led use cases that should resonate well with OEMs and end users, using voice-activated access to LLMs, and then guiding the vehicle around congested traffic, emergencies, construction, etc. But the idea that your vehicle can essentially replace a smart phone for AI agents is especially powerful.

Takeaway Thoughts

As we covered a few weeks ago, Qualcomm has become the undisputed leader providing advanced semiconductor solutions for infotainment and ADAS to the automotive industry. The speed with which they have infused their product portfolio with new and common technology such as the Oryon cores has been quite impressive, switching to a new CPU without missing a schedule beat. Their first implementation of Oryon was for Laptops, competing head to head with Intel and AMD, deliving competitive performance, leading AI, and power efficiency.

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

Disclosures: This article expresses the opinions of the author and is not to be taken as advice to purchase from 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 scores of 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.